At the same time, the majority of U.S. adults with a primary care physician wish they could find more comprehensive information about their doctors online.

While the online ratings and reviews category has seen strong growth in recent years across a number of categories such as consumer electronics, healthcare has lagged behind, and consumers have more or less settled for what they can find out about their doctors from health insurance websites. The end result is that many consumers don’t favor one source of information to evaluate potential doctors outside of their insurance companies’ websites.

More than two-thirds (67%) of adults wish they could find more comprehensive information about doctors online and nearly three-quarters (73%) of people under 35 feel the same way.

Other highlights from the Insider Pages study include:

*Over two-fifths (42%) of adults agree they spent more time researching the latest electronic gadget than their primary care doctor.

*Nearly half (47%) of adults with a PCP agree they chose their doctor primarily on location and not information about the physician’s expertise, malpractice record or online reviews.  

*For one quarter (25%) of adults with a PCP, word of mouth is the most important factor aside from their insurance plan when deciding if a primary care provider was right for them.

WebProNews spoke with Eric Peacock, General Manager, Insider Pages about the new Doctor Finder tool.

Peacock said the Web has made it increasingly easy to find recommendations for things like restaurants and hair salons, but it has largely failed at making it easy to choose a doctor.

"To make an informed choice you really need to have at least three types of information in addition to basic data on the doctor’s specialty and address. The three things are: insurance accepted by that doctor, patient reviews, and objective, third-party validation of the doctor’s credentials and record (e.g. Doctor is free of malpractice or sanctions against their record)," said Peacock.   

"The fact is, people probably spend more time picking out a flat screen TV than they do a doctor because it’s been so difficult to find the information you need about a doctor in one place. As a result, most people end up on their health insurance website and settle with picking a doctor based on how close the physician is to their office or home.  They don’t necessarily get patient reviews or know anything about the doctor."

Peacock said Insider Pages wanted to put medical information in one place and make it searchable using Doctor Finder.

. "So now, for example, if you want to find a board certified, female ob/gyn that accepts Blue Cross, has a clean record and is within two miles of your office – you can do that search in a few seconds using the Doctor Finder," said Peacock.

Peacock said the advantage to using Doctor Finder over a search engine like Google, is it’s a more specialized type of local search.

"Most of our health related traffic comes from people who have started their search on Google but ended up on Insider Pages because they want to be able to use a finer filter for narrowing down the list of potential doctors," said Peacock.

"Google doesn’t specialize in helping you find a doctor based on filters like health insurance, gender, patient rating, proximity to your home or office, track record and the like."

Through a partnership with HealthGrades, a healthcare ratings organization, Insider Pages offers users access to 1.2 million patient ratings and 15 data points on more than 800,000 doctors.

Insider Pages will be on the move, as they give up their Redwood City offices in favor of IAC’s four walls. Citysearch will plug in Insider Pages’ user reviews of local businesses, and have over a million of them to offer visitors.

The purchase should help boost Citysearch’s profile against rival services like Yahoo Local. As a market segment, local search has been forecast as a growing and lucrative one.

"Through this acquisition, Citysearch will strengthen our breadth of user-generated content across numerous business categories nationwide," said Peter Horan, CEO of IAC Media & Advertising.

Borrell Associates predicted a $7.7 billion market for local online advertising in 2007. Of that figure, about $4 billion should find its way into local search.

Leaving all that money on the table for Google and Yahoo to scoop up wouldn’t make much sense. While a new search engine isn’t going to surpass either of those sites for market share, the value-add of reviews and other user generated content in a smaller niche could be a winner.

TechCrunch has previously cited rumors about Insider Pages being acquired. Insider Pages also dumped a lot of staffers in late 2006, due to heavy competition from Yelp and others. Matt Marshall at VentureBeat noted Insider Pages had multiple bidders for it, but Citysearch offered the most complementary option for its services.

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