INFORMATION-BASED SEARCH FOR DENTISTS

Foundoc is a one-stop data-driven marketplace that helps dental patients find the right dentist based on their personal needs and preferences. It is designed to provide dental patients with all substantial factual information and data required to make quick and informed decisions on choosing a dentist. Foundoc either practically eliminates or drastically reduces the need for dental patients to search for information elsewhere or call dental offices on their own. Foundoc takes that burden off dental patients' shoulders, saves them time, and makes finding the right dentist comfortable and confident.

Foundoc collects a great deal of information related to dentists. It includes dentists' educational background, work experience in dentistry, professional affiliations, and in-network insurance company names. Furthermore, Foundoc gathers information about dentists' offices, advanced technology availability, dentist treatment styles, patients' satisfaction, and disciplinary actions. Foundoc collects that information from various online sources, including dentist office websites, patient surveys, and dental claim data repositories.

Foundoc gathers and processes evidence-based data to determine dentists' patient satisfaction indicators (PSI). These indicators characterize how dentists' patients value the quality of the received dental care over time. PSIs include common-sense measures such as how long patients stay with their dentists, how far they commute for dental appointments when other dentists offer similar services nearby, and whether two or more patients from the same family go to same dentists. The primary sources of the PSI data are dental claims and patient medical records.

With Foundoc, data from different dentists can be compared side-by-side. That comparison can be made between two or three dentists at the same time. Additionally, detailed information about dentists and their practices can be found on dentists' profile pages. On those pages, dentists can be contacted through the "Request an Appointment" link.

There are numerous online sources of dentist reviews and ratings. They include Healthgrades, Yelp, Vitals, Zocdoc, U.S.News, and RateMDs. In general, it is worthwhile to read the reviews posted on these websites to learn how patients evaluate their dentists, how they feel about the friendliness of the staff, appointment waiting time, office cleanliness, and parking space availability. However, there are some typical flaws related to such reviews:

• They are subjective and opinion-based.
• They lack substance. Many patients merely praise dentists in their reviews for being excellent, nice, friendly, and knowledgeable.
• The absolute majority of dentists receive top five-star ratings.
• Confusion with negative reviews. While some reviews describing negative experiences are legitimate and helpful, others result from patients' misunderstandings or misjudgments of medical matters (which damage dentists' professional reputations), and some can even be fraudulent. The negative reviews can hardly be found, and some sites remove them per dentists' requests or other reasons.
• Reviews from unverified patients.

By contrast , Foundoc relies on data that can be verified and measures of dental patient satisfaction that are extremely useful in making decisions about which dentist to choose.