UsableMarkets

It seems astounding, yet true, that the internet is even bigger than I can imagine. Case in point: After spending many hours reviewing and thinking about doctor rating and physician search sites, I still learned about a new doctor rating site in my interview with healthcare economist Jane Sarasohn-Kahn.

The site, of course, is Vitals.

Initial reviews are good. And when I looked at it I was also impressed. What makes it better than the other doctor rating sites out there? As Jane says: “Their ’360 degree’ ratings model of providers, which brings together peer reviews, consumer recommendations, and empirical (performance and background) data” goes farther than any other doctor rating site out there.

In addition, it appears that doctors can respond to feedback, allowing (gasp) an actual conversation to happen between physicians and their patients online.

It all sounds good, but will it work?

From a usability perspective it is a great improvement. Searching for and rating a doctor are easy and intuitive. It does miss allowing the user to enter in their health insurance as a way to limit the search results. But for the one doctor I checked up on, the health insurance information was wrong, so maybe they’re not yet confident enough in that data to use it as part of search (to say nothing of the fact that they may have incomplete data).

More importantly, in order to combat the chicken and egg problem of all community sites with user generated content, they have added other, useful performance data. This allows users to get useful information aside from patient ratings. Hopefully this will allow the site time for a community to grow.

Overall though, the best effort yet in a doctor rating site.

Vitals: good design goes a long way

As always, thanks for listening.
~alex