Distinguishing internists among internal medicine doctors

This past week, we rolled out a fix so that if you are looking for a primary care doctor, you should only see doctors who we think are primary care providers. We actually had fixed this a long time before, but when we introduced the new search form a few months ago, we opened up the possibility for this issue to manifest itself again. This error occurs on multiple doctor directory websites, but on our site, you might have triggered the issue if you typed out "internal medicine" (and didn't choose the "Internal Medicine (primary care)" option). Under that scenario, you likely would have also seen specialists such as oncologists, hematologists, and endocrinologists included in the list of results.

One of the underlying issues is that specialists often train in internal medicine before specializing, and computers don't necessarily know to distinguish between what someone has trained in versus what someone currently practices. Obviously specialists are important, but they are not so relevant when users are searching for primary care doctors. So, we fixed that issue on our site. Typing in "Internal Medicine" or "Pediatrics" should now only list doctors who provide primary care.