Want to compare doctors online? Some Health 2.0 startups want to make it easier for you

A group of nine healthcare companies and providers are aiming to turn the tables on often disorganized medical record-keeping — by standardizing information about doctors themselves.

The effort, known as dCard, is aimed at bringing a certain degree of order to the mishmash of information that dozens of online physician directory and rating services currently deal with. Most of these sites grab as much basic information about doctors as they can from publicly available sources — typically consisting, at a minimum, of the doctor’s specialty, contact information, and medical education — then rely on doctors themselves to flesh it out, correct any errors and provide updates, which is pretty clearly untenable for any but those most committed to keeping their online “personas” up-to-date.

The solution offered by these nine organizations is to standardize a sort of “doctor dossier” via dCard — which, straightforwardly enough, stands for “data card.” The idea is to establish basic standards for doctor information that can be shared among adherents, improving the accuracy and clarity of information for health-conscious consumers while also making it easier for doctors to “own” their own online information by keeping a single source — as opposed to dozens — up to date with as much or as little detail as they like.

The group’s release about the standard, which it’s expecting to finalize in April, is here (PDF link). The founding organizations include Nashville, Tenn.-based change:healthcare (our coverage); Within3, an online network for health professionals; Organized Wisdom, providers of a human-edited and doctor-reviewed health-search service; and a number of other largely Web-based healthcare-information organizations. (See the release for a full list.)

More after the jump.

(more…)