Today we launched the Insider Pages Doctor Finder. Our goal was simple – make it a heck of lot easier to search for and find a great doctor that accepts your insurance. We (mostly me) were complaining about how useless the websites offered by our company’s health insurance providers were. On Blue Cross or Aetna you can find a list of specialists near you who take that insurance, but there is nothing in the way of patient reviews, recommendations, or anything about the doctor’s track record. We did a little research and found out that most people choose their doctor based on only two criteria; insurance and location – because that’s all that is available on the insurance website. Compare that to the amount of information available online to someone choosing a flat screen TV and it’s abundantly clear why Americans spend more time picking their TV than their Doctor.
When we looked at our own website, and many other sites like ours, we could see plenty of doctor reviews, but nothing about insurance and record. So we decided to remedy that. Through a partnership with HealthGrades, we’ve pulled together comprehensive profiles of nearly all 900,000 doctors and dentists in the United States. For each we try to list the insurance accepted, their specialty, whether or not they have a clean record, their patient reviews, patient surveys, gender etc.. User reviews are still critical and the driving force behind Insider Pages – but we realized that when it comes to doctors, there was some information (like insurance, board certification, malpractice record, years of experience etc..) that we needed to pull in from other sources.
On top of that we created a very simple search tool that allows you to filter your search by these criteria and sort the results anyway you want.
We view this as Version 1.0 and the first step in helping Insiders make great choices when picking health care providers. At the time of this post we have patient reviews or patient ratings on over 300,000 doctors and dentists (that’s coverage on about one-third of all docs and dentists in the country). We aim to get as close to 100% coverage as we can. We hope you’ll kick the tires of our new Doctor Finder and please help other Insiders out by reviewing your doctors (family practice, ob-gyn, pediatrician, orthopedic surgeons, allergists, dermatologists etc..) and dentists!
More to come.
- Posted by Eric, Insider Pages GM
Written by ericpeacock
Leave a comment