NASHVILLE, Tenn.– careNext, a healthcare disruptor guiding consumers of healthcare (careSumers™) to the most appropriate healthcare provider whenever they need it, wherever they need it, is proud to introduce Doc360°™, a healthcare provider grading system with over 1.1 million care practitioners that will serve as consumers’ “single source of truth” to help them find providers who meet their individual needs.
“We believe the ‘visit’ is the most important moment in healthcare, but there’s been no common definition of success for patients and providers, making it impossible to get a true rating of satisfaction,” said careNext CEO Ron Morales. “Some providers have also had the mindset that if I make you well, I don’t need to make you happy. That’s all changing, and Doc360° was created through a consumer-focused lens to help patients and providers work together toward the common goal of a great visit.”
Implementing a novel approach to grading doctors, Doc360° develops provider scores by sourcing and aggregating physician ratings from multiple web sources. It then combines these ratings with data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), weighting the data using a proprietary algorithm to create a provider “grade.” The result is the most accurate and comprehensive provider score in the marketplace. It is available at no cost to consumers or providers, and it eliminates score gaming by providers, which includes the ability to pay to influence ratings and the ability of competitors to negatively influence providers’ scores.
“Consumers, or careSumers, should know which providers have earned their ratings through a rigorous, certified process — and which ones have inaccurately promoted themselves through manipulated ratings, including deleted low ratings, inflated ratings, and artificially boosted prominent placement on ratings sites,” said careNext Chairman of the Board, Gregg Allen, M.D. “This ‘pay to play’ model perversely promotes a false sense of quality, which takes direct advantage of care consumers.”
The accuracy of Doc360° is a key differentiator, given a recent study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research finding that most doctor-rating websites are inaccurate. The study reviewed 49 literature papers on online patient-reported physician ratings and reviews and found that 53% of these sites contained intrinsic data quality errors, and 61% had contextual quality issues. The most common issues were a lack of negative ratings, emotionally charged comments and anonymous ratings that were not credible. Additionally, premium-paying physicians were able to hide up to three negative comments, and the study found these sites had system interfaces that were not easy to understand and had questionable security and safety of data.
By contrast, careNext is working to incorporate into Doc360° a Patient Relationship Intelligence Matrix™ (PRIM) derived from point-of-care surveys, which is based on the FICO model of personal financial services. careNext believes the “visit” is the only real measure of a successful care transaction. For this reason, its surveys are conducted during the patient discharge process and subjected to an attestation process — proof that the survey was generated by a real patient or their caregiver, not bought and paid for by providers. This will further improve the quality of the information, and as such, improve its true reflective and predictive capabilities beyond anything currently available in the market.
“Our PRIM Score will ultimately replace all patient satisfaction sources and become the single source of truth for patient satisfaction as it continues to gain acceptance and achieves a critical mass,” said Morales. “PRIM will do for personal healthcare what FICO did for personal finance.”
careNext also helps consumers understand their current wellness with its Wellness Intelligence Quotient™ (WIQ) tool, which provides consumers with the tools to assess and self-inventory their current wellness, benchmarked against that of a “healthy” person. The goal is to drive a renewed personal responsibility for one’s healthcare. The consumer has control of their data, and the data helps the consumer simplify and expedite provider office visits and includes financial rewards from entities who can use and/or benefit from the data.
“While we know many aspects of healthcare are broken, we believe we’ve created a unique set of care-related tools that help both care consumers, or careSumers, and providers be successful,” said Dr. Allen. “We believe that only careSumers and providers working together can fix healthcare.”
