Blog

We have a lot of ideas of how to improve our service. We have so many that there's a substantial backlog of improvements just waiting to be designed and implemented. As a result, we find ourselves frequently prioritizing what to work on. Last week, we realized that we would need to invest a fair amount of work to make the search form look decent in Internet Explorer 7. After checking the percentage of visitors to this site that use IE7, we decided that that time could be better spent elsewhere. In case anyone is wondering, here are the browsers that we currently support:

Chrome (version 18 and later)

Firefox (version 13 and later)

Internet Explorer (version 8 and later)

Safari (version 5 and later)

If you're using one of these browsers and see anything that looks amiss, please let us know. Likewise, if you have any ideas on how to improve the service, let us know. Even if the idea is on our list already, we might prioritize it more highly just because you asked.

It's been a while since we added new coverage. We had been working on keeping the data fresh, improving our processes, and enhancing our user interface. Recently, though, we grew the team and have had the opportunity to grow our coverage.

If you happen to be looking for a doctor in Kansas City, MO, San Antonio, TX, or Columbus, OH, try out our service -- you should see richer information. We hope to continue to expand coverage on a regular basis.

On Friday, we updated our homepage with the goal of making it easier for people to find appropriate providers. For instance, to have only a single call to action, we made it so that only a single search bar is visible at a time. By default, people can search by a specialty, condition, or procedure, they don't have to know that terms like "cosmetic surgery" isn't an actual medical specialty. To search by the name of a provider or to search for a hospital, users can select the appropriate tab on the left of the search form.

All in all, we hope that the process is clearer to users new and old, and that the process is quicker than before. We still have some changes that we might be rolling out over time. Nevertheless, if you have ideas on how to improve the website, please let us know.

After reviewing our sitemaps (the pages that showcase the cities for which we feature providers), we noticed that there were quite a few typos -- "New Yor" vs. "New York" for example. Since our sitemaps are automatically generated by our software, they will include all cities in providers' addresses, regardless of whether or not they are misspelled. What we had not realized was how frequent the typos were, not to mention their sheer variety.

The most common misspelled cities tend to be long, but not necessarily obscure:

Instead of Brooklyn, NY, we discovered "Brookly," "Brookyln," and "Brookyn."

In lieu of San Francisco, CA, we found "San Franciso" vs. "San Francsico," and "San Fransisco".

In place of Philadelphia, PA, (an admittedly difficult-to-spell name), a slew of silly alternatives:

"Phialdelphia," "Philadelhia," "Philadelpia," "Philadephia," "Philadlephia," "Philaelphia," "Phildelphia," "Philiadelphia."

Perhaps most unexpected were typos in state names. We were surprised to discover that several sources had listed providers' offices as being in "Tucson, AS" -- AS as in American Samoa. Or addresses that placed doctors in fantastical locations such New York, North Carolina or Brooklyn, New Mexico.

In the upcoming weeks, we hope to pare down the number of typos in city names to further improve your experience using DocSpot.

We're always looking for new and relevant sources of information to integrate into our database so that people can more easily find doctors that match what they're looking for. Recently, someone mentioned that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published a list of providers who were eligible to receive the EHR Incentive Program. We thought that would be a great resource in helping patients figure out which providers use an electronic medical record, so we integrated data from CMS's website.

You can see a sample profile that incorporates that data

here. We'll be refreshing that list periodically to reflect the growing numbers of providers who are participating in that program.