Scaling up the doctor blog - a plea to the internet

www.dcdoctors.blogspot.com is now on the Google radar screen - yesterday there were four people who accessed the site by doing searches for specific doctor names (all happened to be good recommendations, by the way). I realize that this is rather insignificant in the order of things, but I know that it would make me feel good if, among the search results of various databases of doctor addresses, I actually found something personal, written by a well-meaning stranger, that would reassure me about the human element of the decision I was trying to make. If only this kind of website existed on a large scale, with some kind of thoroughness (and perhaps information about health care coverage) and with some kind of database organization that would make it easily searchable. Because mine, right now (and four search hits notwithstanding), is nothing more than an emotional salve for my own petty trauma.

I really think this would be a valuable nonprofit project. It would probably be pretty tech-heavy (maintaining the online searchable database) but would also have a marketing component (outreach to doctors' patients to get them to share their experiences - and to get people to use the website) - and it would have to have some pretty strong leadership to maintain scrupulous objectivity in the face of what would probably be some heavy pressure from the health care establishment. If I was a tycoon philanthropist, I would totally fund it.

The www.leapfrog.org site looks pretty good, but only rates hospitals. What I'm envisioning would be similar to the www.epinions.com website, but for doctors.

C'mon DC - you're full of overachieving world savers! Somebody should start this!