Improving Online Doctor Listings

I just spent the day looking through many different online doctor listings, and I noticed some things they all have in common, and some thing that most of these listings just don't have. Most listings are focused more on the doctor then the practice. They have the doctor's information - education, degrees, affiliated hospitals, and so on, but pretty much nothing about the practice itself. None of these listing have the doctor's website's listed. They all separated the individual doctors from the practices they work in, and in many cases, founded. This is a mistake.

In no other profession, do you list the owner of a business separate from their business. I'm not just looking for a doctor, I'm looking for a doctor's office. Especially when seeking out family practices, and general practitioners, I want to know what sort of services, hours and locations the practice or hospital the doctor works at keeps. ZocDoc.com, a very respectable and very popular doctor listing site, allows you to book online appointments with any doctor in their database, and read reviews from previous clients. They don't, however, tell you anything about the practice the doctor works for. Many of them don't even tell you the name of the doctor's hospital or practice. 

It's a system set up to prioritize patients who already have the names of doctors they'd like to consult, and need more information about. If you're seeking out a new eye doctor, or dentist, or family practitioner using ZocDoc, and most of the other doctor listings like healthygrades.com, you'll find yourself having to do additional searching to find out information about that doctor's practice. A practice is nothing without good doctors, but good doctors function within existing structures -within practices and hospitals. When you're looking for a doctor, you're also looking for the doctor's office.

Online medical listings should reflect that reality. When you're looking at universities, you may be drawn to a school because of its excellent professors. But if the most accessible information about a university said nothing about the school itself, and focused only on the teachers, you wouldn't go to that school.

What are some ways online medical listings can be changed to improve the experience? If you have any additional tips or suggestions, things that worked or didn't work for you, let us know in the comments, or by contacting us on twitter and facebook.