Find Local doctor

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Friday, September 16, 2011

EMR list

Here’s a few that I have websites for off the top of my head:
Amazing Charts – website
Care360 (Quest) – website
MxSecure – website
GE Centricity – website

MDCare – website
Mitochon Systems – website – Free EMR
Nuesoft – website
Practice Fusion – website – Free EMR
SoapWare – website

simplifyMD – website
Medtuity – website – EMR Only
FreeDOM – website

– Free EMR
MirrorMed – website – Free and Open Source EHR and Practice Management System
OpenEMR – website – Free and Open Source EHR and Practice Management System
FreeMed – website – Free and Open Source EHR and Practice Management System
Life Record – website – Free EMR
A4 Health Systems – website
NextGen – website

eClinicalWorks – website

eMDs – website – EMR Demo
Greenway – website

WebMD – website
Praxis – website
Aprima (formerly iMedica) – website

Medinotes – website
Office Practicum – website – Pediatrics EMR
Practical Medical Record – website – New Pediatric EMR
Pulse – website

DescriptMED – website
Medamation – website – EMR Only
Practice Sudio Suite – website
Athena – website

Practice Partner – website – EMR Demo
OmniMD – website – Specialty EMR
gloEMR – website
Allscripts – website

SynaMed – website
practiceIT – website
Waiting Room Solutions – website

MED3000 InteGreat EHR – website
STI Computer Services – website
TECNEX POMS – website
Sequel Med – website

Abraxus Medical Solutions – website

1st Provider’s Choice – website

Sage – website

Many Many MANY more EMR and EHRs to come!

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Doctor Maps Categorically

Category maps.
Acupuncture Category Map
Allergy And Immunology Category Map
Anatomic And Clinical Pathology Category Map
Anesthesiology Category Map
Cardiology Category Map
Chiropractic Medicine Category Map
Cytopathology Category Map
Dentist Category Map
Dermatology Category Map
Diabetes, Endocrinology And Metabolism Category Map
Endocrinology Category Map
Family Practice Category Map
Gastroenterology Category Map
General Surgery Category Map
Geriatric Psychiatry Category Map
Geriatrics Category Map
Gerontology Category Map
Hematology Category Map
Homeopathy Category Map
Immunopathology Category Map
Infectious Disease (Infectious Diseases) Category Map
Infertility And IVF Category Map
Internal Medicine Category Map
Medical Genetics Ph.D. Category Map
Midwife Category Map
Nephrology Category Map
Neurodevelopment Disabilities Category Map
Neurology Category Map
Neuroradiology Category Map
Neurosurgery Category Map
Obstetrics And Gynecology Category Map
Oncology Category Map
Ophthalmology Category Map
Optometrics Category Map
Orthodontics Category Map
Orthopedics Category Map
Other Category Map
Otolaryngology Category Map
Otology And Neurotology Category Map
Pain Management Category Map
Pathology Category Map
Pediatrics Category Map
Periodontal Category Map
Podiatry Category Map
Proctology Category Map
Psychiatry Category Map
Psychology Category Map
Pulmonary Category Map
Radiology Category Map
Rehabilitation, Occupational And Physical Therapy Category Map
Rheumatology Category Map
Sleep Disorders Category Map
Social Worker Category Map
Surgical Assistant Category Map
Thoracic Surgeon Category Map
Transplant Hepatology Category Map
Urgent Care Category Map
Urology Category Map

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Picking up doctors online

For most people, picking a doctor is hardly a scientific process. They ask friends or family members to pass along names of doctors they like and trust, or rely on another doctor's referral.

Increasingly, health plans and independent groups are making physician information available online to help consumers make these choices more methodically. But experts caution that most doctor-rating systems are still rudimentary, and a four-star rating or other high-performance designation may not reliably reflect a doctor's abilities. While ratings can provide helpful information, consumers still need to dig a little to find the best doctors for their needs.

More From This Series:Insuring Your Health

The systems provided by some health plans to rate doctors are typically based on two factors: cost and quality. Data that measure the quality of care -- whether a diabetic gets regular blood-sugar tests or foot exams, for example -- are not as easy to translate to the level of individual doctors but cost is, so cost tends to be the bigger factor.

"Often insurers will do a two-step process," says Ha Tu, a senior health researcher at the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan research and policy organization based in Washington. First, they "make sure doctors meet a quality threshold, but not a very high one. Then they'll weed them out further based on cost."

Complicating the situation for consumers is the fact that every insurer measures these variables differently, and there are no agreed-upon standards for which combination of attributes makes a top-notch doctor. In fact, a physician who receives a top rating from one insurer may receive a middling or even low score from another, says Elizabeth McGlynn, associate director at Rand Health, a division of Rand, a think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif.

It's no surprise then that doctors are resistant to many insurer efforts to rate physicians. In a recent letter to 47 health plans, the American Medical Association and 46 state medical societies asked the plans to improve the accuracy, reliability and transparency of physician ratings. To support this call for change, the letter pointed to research by Rand that examined physician cost profiles and found that health-plan ratings were inaccurate up to two-thirds of the time.

Although rating systems may have problems, experts agree their use is only going to rise. As insurers and employers try to hold down health-care costs, steering patients toward doctors and other providers who provide the best care for the money is an important priority. Increasingly, employers are trying to provide employees with financial incentives to use doctors in so-called high-performance networks, says Karen Frost, health and welfare outsourcing practice leader for benefits consultant Hewitt Associates.

While insurers and physicians battle it out, consumers are left feeling confused. As Chris Worthington of Rock Hill, N.Y., learned, sometimes a high-performance rating may not even have much to do with patient care. When the 45-year-old middle school teacher was trying to research doctors on her health plan's Web site, she learned that a four-star rating was based on whether a doctor used electronic medical records.

"I think they have the information there that's most important to the insurance company, not the consumer," she says.

Some of the measures that matter most to consumers aren't included in many rating systems, experts say. They include doctors' interpersonal skills and other concerns such as: Do the doctors spend enough time with patients and answer their questions? Do they stay on schedule or do patients have long waits?

"These are some of the best predictors of patient satisfaction, and even outcomes," says McGlynn, noting that no matter how clinically competent a doctor is, a patient's health won't improve if he doesn't understand how to take the prescribed medication.

Consumers sometimes turn to independent sites to get a glimpse of what a particular doctor might be like. The sites -- such as HealthGrades, RateMDs.com and Angie's List -- differ in some respects: They may or may not permit anonymous comments, for example, or charge a fee. But they all provide a forum for people to learn what other consumers have to say about specific physicians.

Since moving to Indianapolis, Dan Tuten has used Angie's List to help find four doctors. The 69-year-old retired software engineer says it takes a while to learn how to extract useful information. "These are just regular folks commenting, and you tend to see a lot of 'A' ratings," he says. But Tuten says he wouldn't trust an insurance company rating. "My impression is they steer you to a doctor because they're the least expensive," he says.

In trying to research doctors, Tuten and Worthington are in the minority of consumers. Most people don't do any research, suggesting that health-plan rating sites may face a difficult task getting consumers to use them. In a 2008 survey by researchers at the Center for Studying Health System Change, half of the respondents said they relied on friends or relatives to choose a primary-care physician. Nearly 40 percent turned to a doctor or other health-care provider. Only a little over a third used information from their health plan.

"Picking a physician is a very personal choice, and often you rely on people you know," says study lead author Tu. "It's not necessarily true that the
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Study Points to Biases in Online Physician Ratings

Physicians have long argued that doctor rating websites provide biased information that does not accurately reflect the quality of care patients receive.

In a statement, the American Medical Association said, "Patient satisfaction is important to physicians, and patients should have access to credible information so they can be confident in their choice of physician, but public web forums have many shortcomings." It added, "Some allow postings to be published anonymously, and there is no guarantee that the opinions about a physician even come from that physician's patient. People may express dissatisfaction on these forums because they wanted a medication that wasn't medically necessary, or because they didn't receive a prescription or service that was delayed or denied by their insurance company."

Physicians might be partially right about biases in online ratings, but not in the way many of those doctors assumed.

A new study by researchers at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business and the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health examined the informativeness of online ratings about primary care physicians. Researchers found that low-quality physicians actually are less likely to be reviewed online. In fact, the majority of online physician ratings are very positive.

Guodong "Gordon" Gao -- an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and one of the study's authors -- noted that out of about 300,000 physicians ratings studied, half were given the highest score possible -- a five out of five.

So are physicians' concerns about patients relying on online ratings to make health care decisions -- much the same way they turn to such sites to make decisions about where to eat or book a hotel -- off base? Maybe, but maybe not.

Study Details

For the study -- titled, "The Information Value of Online Physician Ratings" -- researchers relied on several data sets, including:

An offline patient survey conducted by consumer advocacy group Consumers' Checkbook;
Online physician ratings collected from RateMDs.com;
Information from the 2007 Economic Census on population and median income in the areas the physicians practice in; and
State medical board websites for physician information, such as board certification, physician experience and specialty.

The study focused on general practitioners, or family care physicians. The final data set included 1,513 physicians who had been evaluated through offline surveys and 696 doctors who had been rated online. Researchers then compared physician scores on the offline survey with the online physician ratings.

Study Findings

The study found a correlation between a high offline survey rating and the probability of a physician being rated online. If a physician received a low score in the online survey, there was a low probability of him or her being rated online.

Gao said, "I think it comes from human nature. We are pretty reluctant to talk about negative things."

However, the study did find that the probability of being reviewed online increases dramatically for physicians rated in the extreme low end of the quality spectrum in the offline survey. In addition, patients who rate doctors online are more likely to exaggerate their opinions, according to the study.

Researchers say these findings show that the "sound of silence" effect is seen across the quality spectrum of physicians, while the "bad mouthing" effect is visible among very low-end quality doctors.

The findings also showed a strong correlation between the online ratings and patients' offline opinions, but the association was strongest for physicians with the lowest quality ratings. Therefore, online ratings identifying low-quality physicians tend to be the most informative.

Gao explained that if "a physician is exceptionally good and another physician is relatively good, both physicians will [have] a decent chance to get a 5 out of 5." He added, "The online ratings cannot really separate the very best from good."

On the other hand, physicians with negative ratings are not as clustered together. "There's a lot of variation in those ratings. So it's actually easy for us to tell which physician is worse than the other if they are both in the low end," Gao said.

Online Doctor Ratings Useful, But Proceed With Caution

AMA said, "Online opinions of physicians should be taken with a grain of salt and certainly not be the sole resource when looking for physician information. More reliable options are available like checking with your state medical board or asking trusted family and friends about their physicians. Patients can also ask their current physician for a referral." It added, "Choosing a physician is more complicated than choosing a good restaurant, and patients owe it to themselves to use the best available resources when researching a physician."

Although the study found potential biases in online physician ratings, Gao maintains that such information is still useful. He said that "patients really need this information," adding, "This is in high demand, so these websites provide a way for us to help each other sharing our wisdom of the crowd. I think it is a very good thing."

He noted that the study did find "a pretty strong correlation between the online ratings and quality. At the low end, it's much higher than at the high end, but overall the quality correlation is still there. So it has value."

Gao said the onus is on patients to use online ratings with caution. He said that patients need to "realize that these ratings are posted by people who are motivated to rate, which means that the ratings tend to be extremes -- either very negative or very positive."

He added that it is important to keep in mind that physician rating websites still are at an early stage. He noted that the average number of online ratings for each physician is three. Because the sample sizes are so small, the variation in the information can be high. Gao said, "Don't rely on one or two ratings to judge a physician."

Lastly, patients should consult information beyond online ratings when making a decision about a health care provider, Gao said. "Go and talk to the people surrounding you and look at other information, such as physician awards or whether a physician has a malpractice history."

He said that patients should "make judgments on comprehensive information, not just one or two ratings online."

How To Improve Online Rating Sites

There also are ways to improve the physician rating websites, themselves, according to Gao.

He said that "if the number of ratings [for a physician] is low, like one or two, you probably shouldn't put it on the website because then that physician's reputation is determined by one or two patients, [whose ratings] can be highly volatile."

Another physician rating website best practice is to give doctors the opportunity to respond to patients' reviews. Patients "want to hear both parties' arguments" he said, adding that allowing physicians to respond provides "a more complete picture."

In addition to patient ratings, websites should offer other data, such as objective quality measures from the federal government, according to Gao. He said that while such information is not as easy to understand, "there needs to be a way to integrate those different sources of information and make it easily digestible to people like us."

Future Research

Gao and his colleagues are conducting ongoing research to see if their findings about general practitioner ratings can be extended to other specialties.

He said he also plans to study whether online physician ratings "reflect true clinical quality."

Gao noted that the study used an offline patient survey to measure quality but that it also is important to examine whether clinical quality can be reflected in physician ratings.

He said, "There's a lot of debate here. A lot of physicians say that patients are not in a position to judge a physician's quality." Gao said he hopes future research can determine "to what extent patients can judge a physician's quality."