As an insurance company, we support our members by presenting them with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their care. As we think about how to provide the best possible experience for our members, one of our primary goals is to help them select the “right” healthcare provider for themselves. But what does it mean for a provider to be the right fit for a member? A review of patient choice studies echoes what we may intuitively all know – it’s all about the “complex interplay between patient and provider characteristics.” To us, this means that we need to allow our members to search for providers across a wide range of features, including specialization, distance from home or work, and patient panel demographics.
As we set out to build Oscar’s provider search, we knew that the industry standard simplistic search based largely on a provider’s static attributes (e.g. years of experience, education, hospital affiliations, distance) had to be replaced with a more dynamic, personalized experience.
