When you’re hunting for a general physician or specialist, there are three main databases to scour: an insurer’s website, Yelp, and doctor search engines like ZocDoc. Most insurance and doctor search engines give you information on the doctor’s office location, education, and their medical specialties. Yelp can give you anything from well-reasoned reviews, to write-ups that give a doctor two stars because the receptionist was rude. ZocDoc goes deeper with reviews, but works primarily as a front-end for managing a physician’s practice.
In every case, what’s missing from the information you can find online is whether or not a fellow doctor trusts a particular physician’s work. Who are the doctors my doctor trusts the most? Or conversely, what do other physicians think of my doctor?
One way to measure that is referrals, the number of times one doctor is referred by another. More referrals imply greater expertise, confidence, and trust on the part of people who should know best: fellow doctors. It is the same logic that Google uses with its Page Rank algorithm. The more times something is linked to, the higher quality it is deemed to be and thus appears higher in search results.
After endless digging, and a freedom of information request to get the data, healthcare startup HealthTap is launching a service that maps out physician connections based on 25 million referrals from within the Medicare and Medicaid system. Called DOConnect, it’s the first time a tool like this has been made available to consumers. At the most basic, says HealhTap founder and CEO Ron Gutman, DOConnect is designed to help you find the doctors that other doctors trust. It goes live today.
HealthTap is a network of patients and doctors where patients can find doctors, and ask medical questions of specific physicians (for a fee) or to entire network. HealthTap already rates the doctors in its system based on how often they use the site to answer patient questions, and if other doctors agree with those answers. Now it’s adding information about which doctors get referred to the most so patients can find the most trusted MDs.
Using a map (right), HealthTap lays out all the referrals a particular doctor receives from around their city, state, or the entire U.S. You can see that, say, your general care physician Dr. Smith always refers his patients with heart problems to cardiologist Dr. Jones. You can assume that Dr. Smith trusts Dr. Jones’ work and likely shares a similar approach of caring for a patient. Likewise, if Dr. Jones gets frequent referrals from 10 different doctors, you can trust that she’s a competent practitioner.
Dr. Jeff Livingston, an OBGYN based in Texas who uses HealthTap, contends that the way a patient chooses a doctor is broken. “Often patients read online reviews and make a choice based on the friendliness of the receptionist or availability of parking, not the actual quality of a doctor,” he says. He hopes that going forward, when he gives a patient a referral to two different doctors, they use DOConnect to research each provider and find the one who is right for them. Livingston also sees people using it as filter to find their first, or a new, general care doctor based on how many doctors refer to them.
At the highest level, Gutman is trying to solve what he views as a transparency problem in medicine. “Patients are flying blind,” he says. “What we are doing is trying to build a trust graph or quality graph, and bring some data to an industry where there is a complete lack of transparency.” The next step is to open up the data to other developers and see what they can do with it, Gutman say.
While “flying blind” may be an overstatement, most patients are at least a good deal fuzzy when it comes to the intricacies of the medical profession. Part of that is our fault, patients need to ask more questions, and become more informed. And that is where tools like DOConnect ought to help. If everyone gets smarter about health care, and how to navigate the medical industry that can only lead to better outcomes. And that of course, is the whole point.
Finding the Doctors Your Doctor Trusts
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Finding the Doctors Your Doctor Trusts
