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On occasion, we'll receive an e-mail asking us to remove a profile completely. Sometimes, the request is triggered by fears of unfavorable reviews that patients might leave. We understand that concern, especially since some of what is posted on the internet is not actually true. In the interest of transparency, it is not our policy to hide what is already a matter of public record. While some of the reviews that are posted are not true, we think that most of the information is likely true and that on balance, the good outweighs the bad. For that reason, we plan on continuing to allow users to leave reviews. We suggest, however, that social media can cut both ways and that providers need not simply resign themselves to inaction.

Instead of visiting the myriad of sites out there and trying to get each one to hide publicly available information, it may be more effective to encourage your patients to leave reviews about their interactions with you. If enough of your satisfied patients leave reviews, the other prospective patients will get a better sense of your style and can choose accordingly. Rather than shunning the effects of social media, we encourage providers who are concerned about their online reputation to engage with the platforms, whether it be updating profiles to highlight what's special about them or whether it be encouraging their customers to leave reviews.

I've been analyzing reviews left on different sites and found something surprising. While I knew that some reviews are not actually left by patients who had seen the health care provider, I was surprised to see how widespread the problem can be. For example, if you perform an internet search for "I was worried that they were going to wear an obnoxious cologne", you might see many thousands of reviews on a site that include that specific phrasing. That suggests that someone developed software to automatically post reviews on a site. Unfortunately, without seeing a number of reviews across different providers, it can be hard to detect problems like this. (There are other phrases elsewhere that indicate similar issues.)

Assessing the value of patient reviews is tricky... on one hand, they can offer valuable feedback from actual patients; on the other hand, it's hard to know whether any specific review represents an authentic encounter. Hence, when selecting a provider, you might want to consider other aspects of a provider's care (in addition to the patient reviews that have been left about that provider).

Registered users can now express some preferences. These preferences are recorded at user registration and can be modified when visiting the "My account" link ("Edit", then "Preferences"). The first preference applies to everyone: users that want to hear about new features that are being released should check this box. The other three preferences are more oriented towards providers, asking if they are open to consulting, volunteering, or new career opportunities.

For now, these are placeholders to capture users' preferences early on; at the moment, none of these are being used (for example, we haven't been sending out e-mails announcing our new features). As the site matures, these preferences may come into play. Let us know if you have other ideas of preference options that you think we should offer.

Sometimes people change their names. For example, when a woman marries, she might take the last name of her husband. In the process, she might also change her middle name to be her former middle name. There's a slight issue in that if a provider has built up a practice with her former last name, she might want keep the power of that personal brand by letting people know her previous name.

Up until recently, we didn't have a way of allowing users to indicate their former names. One provider creatively indicated that by adding "formerly Penn" as a last name. Given how common this situation can be, we made changes this week so that providers can specify their former name. For now, the name will show up in parentheses, but we might change the display as time goes on.

Last week, we rolled out a small feature to help users pinpoint the geography of their searches. When users limit their searches to a certain geography (for example, a city), our site calls upon a geocoding service that translates the name of that geographic location into coordinates to perform the search. In some cases, a location can be reasonably translated into more than one set of coordinates. It used to be that when this happened, we would take the first set of coordinates.

Our small tweak continues to take the first set of coordinates; however, it will now also display other possibilities. For example, if you were to search for pediatricians in "Wake Forest, NC", you'll see a list of pediatricians in the vicinity of Wake Forest University, NC. You'll also see the option to see search results near the city of Wake Forest, NC.