Medical Provider Search Referral Data Integration
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Medical service provider search sites face challenges in providing information that accurately meets patients' subjective expectations, as objective criteria alone are insufficient to ensure user satisfaction, and maintaining comprehensive subjective evaluations of service providers in a database is impractical.
Innovation Solution
A system and method that enhances medical service provider information by incorporating referral data, including actual and inferred referrals, to provide a more comprehensive and accurate representation of provider quality and reputation, using a referral processing engine to transform and integrate referral values with existing provider information for enhanced search results.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If comprehensive subjective evaluations of service providers are maintained in a database, then user satisfaction and accuracy of match results improve, but database size and complexity become unmanageable
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces referral data as an intermediary indicator that indirectly reflects provider quality and reputation. Instead of storing comprehensive subjective evaluations directly, the system uses referral patterns (number of referrals received from other providers) as a proxy measure that correlates with provider quality without requiring direct storage of all subjective evaluation data.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses referral data as a simplified copy or proxy representation of complex subjective evaluations. Rather than storing and processing entire evaluation datasets, the patent captures essential quality information through referral counts and patterns, creating a condensed representation that maintains predictive value while reducing complexity.
2Device complexity
If objective criteria alone are used to rank service providers, then database management remains simple, but user satisfaction decreases because subjective expectations are not met
Solution Approach 1:
The patent enhances the ranking system by adding referral data as a new parameter alongside traditional objective criteria. This allows the system to maintain its simple database structure while incorporating additional dimensions (referral patterns, provider reputation indicators) that better align with user subjective expectations without fundamentally complicating the underlying system.
3Reliability
If referral data is incorporated to enhance provider information, then user satisfaction and confidence in provider quality increase, but data processing complexity and computational requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts and isolates referral data as a separate, focused metric that can be processed independently before being integrated with existing provider information. This extraction approach allows the system to leverage referral patterns for enhancing quality assessment without requiring complete restructuring of the entire data processing pipeline.
Data Source
AI summary
A system is described for rendering medical service provider entity information. The system is configured to identify a medical service provider entity for which referrals data enhanced medical service provider information will be rendered for presentation to a requesting user. The a medical service provider referral processing engine accesses medical service provider referral information relating to the medical service provider entity, wherein the referral information specifies a value representing referrals received by the medical service provider entity. The referral processing engine transforms the referral information to render a received referrals value, wherein the transformation comprises at least summing a plurality of referral values corresponding to referrals received by the medical service provider entity. The referrals value is incorporated with medical service provider information to render referrals data enhanced medical service provider information.