jamesfly

“If we [Economic Hit Men] falter, a more malicious form of hit man, the jackal, steps to the plate. And if the jackal fails, then the job falls to the military.”

John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Your homepage says “NOW COVERED BY INSURANCE” with Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield listed, but when going through your signup, it says “Advocacy isn't covered by Blue Cross Blue Shield just yet. We're working on it!”

Just curious, why would you put a figure on the signing bonus but not the salary?

Thanks a lot :) That’s really helpful. I’m working on adding a map view for now, but will save this for when I get there.

The second version of https://www.physician.fyi/ , a database of doctors and other medical practitioners with their disciplinary actions for patients to check. In this version, I’m expanding it to include all 6.5 million practitioners in the US, and integrating more data like how much doctors have been paid by drug/device companies. I’m planning on adding patient reviews/complaints too.

It’s the biggest and dirtiest dataset I’ve ever worked with, so it’s been interesting to figure out practical solutions to run things fast and generalize cleaning tasks. Of course it’ll be impossible to get every case (I can only match about half of the state licenses to national records at the moment), so I’ll have to figure out a user-edit/consensus system for the rest.

I’m making a new version [1] of https://www.physician.fyi that has this as a key trait since I'm trying to show medical practitioners' complete individual profiles as well as aggregate patterns across practitioners. I took inspiration from https://www.plasticlist.org. I'm still trying to figure out how to integrate the chart(s) and map now, so I'd appreciate any ideas.

[1] https://ibb.co/VYQpcz9Z

Fixed thanks.

We've got Florida now too!

Thanks! I'm looking at the Contribute page and seeing some cool ideas.

It's fuzzy search, so the most relevant ones should be ordered correctly. I can certainly tune the threshold to not keep less relevant ones.

Thank you. I'm going to refine the site a bit more over the next week and maybe do a second state myself to make sure my pattern generalizes well before opening up the repo, but I've now made a discord https://discord.gg/bXdk4CuR7B for anyone interested in contributing.

Thank you. I'm going to refine it a little more over the next week and maybe do a second state myself to make sure my pattern generalizes well before opening up the repo, but I've now made a discord https://discord.gg/bXdk4CuR7B for anyone interested in contributing.

Thank you. I'm going to refine the site and data a little more over the next week and maybe do a second state myself to make sure my pattern generalizes well before opening up the repo, but I've now made a discord https://discord.gg/bXdk4CuR7B for anyone interested in contributing.

Thank you. I'm going to refine the site and data a little more over the next week and maybe do a second state myself to make sure my pattern generalizes well before opening up the repo, but I've now made a discord https://discord.gg/bXdk4CuR7B for anyone interested in contributing.

Thank you for offering to help. I'm going to refine the site and data a little more over the next week and maybe do a second state myself to make sure my pattern generalizes well before opening up the repo, but I've now made a discord https://discord.gg/bXdk4CuR7B for anyone interested in contributing.

Sorry to hear you've also had poor experiences. I too had to delve into Pubmed to figure out what was going on with me after the doctor harmed me.

Thank you for offering to help out. I do want to refine the site and data a little more over the next few days and maybe do a second state myself to make sure my pattern generalizes well before opening up the repo.

I've now made a discord here https://discord.gg/bXdk4CuR7B for anyone interested in contributing.

Comments on doctors should already be enabled via Disqus if you scroll to the bottom of a profile page.

Yes, I definitely want to add that data!

"—more states coming soon" ;) No state publishes this depth of data machine readable. u/cobertos covered the rest in their reply.

Thank you! I too had no idea it existed before it happened to me.

Something patient-initiated should always be possible. Already patients take to Yelp and Google Maps to leave reviews, but they are often taken down by the doctor/business. I've enabled comments on doctors' profiles as a first step toward this, but you make me think I could improve it by allowing submission of new doctors worldwide.

Thank you for the recommendation. I plan to enable geo-filtering via the map. I'll need to figure out what is the best granularity to do so at—maybe county. I might be able to give an option for the granularity too.

Thank you. I agree that even though in the US this stuff is not as available as it could be, it still beats most of the world. That's why I think allowing for patients to report the information is so important. I've taken the first step toward that by enabling comments on each doctor's profile.

So sorry that happened to you too. Thank you for signing the petition—I hope that would obviate the need for this site altogether.

I marked the map feature beta because I noticed the geocoding wasn't accurate for all addresses. I'll get on that. I'm hesitant to just exclude ones not in the US though because it's possible a doctor has a California license while primarily practicing in another country, just like that case.

Thanks but the site seems to be down. Do you have another link?

I have to admit I missed a few hundred out of about 18k PDFs. I didn't keep track of which ones I archived on my initial pass, so I need to rerun the whole script which takes about a week with Web Archive's rate limit, so I've just been putting it off. I was also thinking people who visit them can click the "archive" button in cases it's not yet archived to crowdsource the effort, like you seem to have done.

Thank you.

1. Fixed

2. Do you think this is because the URL stores the filter params, so every time you change a filter it's a new address? Do you have any examples of similar sites and how they behave? I can change this if it's not standard.

Thank you. I'll fix this. I'm working out dark mode for the map, so I'll do it along with that when I figure it out.

Thank you. I'll fix asap. The data source only gives me the names as complete names in "last, first middle" format, and I didn't want to take risk parsing them since there are inconsistencies, but I'll work it out. For now, I've clarified the format in the placeholder of that field.

I've read some others with undercover agents when federal money is involved in the care like the patient using Medicaid and the doctor repeatedly uses that as a ticket for billing unnecessary services.

Thank you. Here [1] is the source for one, which states "An arbitration award is a payment for damages and does not necessarily reflect that the physician's medical competence is below the standard of care. The Medical Board reviews all such reported arbitration awards and action is taken only if it is determined that a violation of the Medical Practice Act occurred. The Medical Board is prohibited by law from releasing a copy of the arbitration award report or any other information concerning the award." I am still unsure if that means the award was in the doctor's or patient's favor, and because the report is secret, it may not be possible to find out, but please let me know if you know how I could find out.

I also want to mention that patients are forced into arbitration via the contract for service they initially sign [2] that many don't read (whether due their inability to understand it or time constraints on needing immediate care and limited availability of doctors). However, I think it's a shady practice that hurts patients [3] and it would be worth keeping the data showing doctors taking advantage of it regardless. The main excerpt from the article supporting my thoughts is "Doctors’ attorneys are more likely to develop relationships with the arbitrators, they say, who, in turn, may give the plaintiff only a token award to get continued business from doctors."

[1] https://search.dca.ca.gov/details/8002/G/77959/9df8d122bd5b5...

[2] https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2007/ccp/1295.html

[3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-24-he-22804...