XOOVA BLOG

Hello 2 Point O

This week, Xoova took 2.0 from the doctor side of the equation to the consumer side of the equation.

Until now, our 2.0 cred rested on the doctor's ability to quickly and easily update her own profile, offer online appointment scheduling, and share her expertise and philosophy of care. Doctors appreciated that we took a measured and respectful approach to patient feedback. They appreciated that we first created a comprehensive directory that gives the full measure of the doctor's clinical interests.

Now the patients get their voice on Xoova.

As the leading directory of doctors and medical services (we beat WebMD's doctor directory last month) we have the opportunity to create a vast community of people who will thoughtfully and constructively share their experiences with their doctors.

We know others are out there doing doctor ratings and reviews, and some are doing it well. We enter the field knowing that ratings and reviews must be in context. We'll marry them with doctor quality information, a referral network, and hundreds of thousands of comprehensive profiles. With this in hand, patients will have what they need to make the best choice for a doctor.

Momentum

Press release day.

When things are going well, it's fun to do a bit of chest pounding. Xoova has seen our unique visitors and page views rise 70% month over month (that little downtick in the arrow to the left? Not us!) since our site launched in July. We've tripled the number of doctors and major medical practices with Xoova usernames and passwords in the last month alone. And doctors who offer appointments online are getting five times as many page views as doctors who don't.

When we started this site, we wanted to make booking a doctor's appointment easier than the traditional way of calling during limited office hours and waiting on hold. What we found was an opportunity to be the market leader helping people find local doctors and medical services. On the flipside, we made it easier for doctors to share their philosophy of care in an environment that doesn't commoditize them with one-to-five star ratings. Everyone wins.

On a personal note, my sister was diagnosed with cancer this week. Many thoughtful friends are sending me names of oncologists in the Bay Area. The first thing I do with that? I "Xoova" them to find out more. It's heartbreaking to have to access oncologist profiles with such a personal agenda, but it's also gratifying to use my own site as a resource. That's the vision. And that's the reality.

Read the press release here.

Moving Day

We're about to part with some pretty sweet digs here on 20th and Colorado to move into digs of our own. Until today, Xoova has been subleasing a beautiful corner, replete with top-of-the-line Herman Miller chairs and views of waving bamboo, from the friendly folks at Business.com. Their energy has been terrific for us (along with basking in their climate of success -- they sold to RH Donnelly for $345 million in July).

So why are we moving? Well, we had to. Business.com is growing, they need the space back, and we've been summarily kicked to the curb (not really. They've been ever so gracious).

I believe that being forced to do a less than ideal move that we hadn't planned will undoubtedly make us better. Look at what happened when we lost our domain name doctorsdirect.com. We became Xoova, changed our business model for the better, updated the site to be far more accessible and useful, and kickstarted our whole company.

When we move into 1317 5th Street, 3rd Floor, we'll have a slightly less fabulous view, I won't be chair rolling distance from my buddy Chris, and we'll have to buy our own organic coffee. But we'll also have our own rooftop access, a shark tank, and can look out our windows straight across the alley to the Google corporate office.  That Google flag waving will be our new climate of success to bask in. 

The Numbers Don't Lie

At Xoova, we're always paying attention to the numbers. We vigilantly watch site traffic, count the increasing number of unique visitors, calculate the number of physicians with enhanced profiles...and every week (say it with me now!) is better than the week before.

There were two big numbers recently, though, that made us sit up and take notice. I wrote about one number, 315,000, in the Health 2.0 Blog yesterday. That's the number of people who walked away from UnitedHealth Group LAST YEAR ALONE, solely because of poor customer service.

The second number is, to me, directly related to the first. That number refers to the percentage of people who would like the ability to schedule a doctor's appointment online. To wit: "Three-fourths (77%) of adults feel that patients should be able to schedule an appointment with their physician via email or the Internet..." - WSJ/Harris Interactive November 2007

People want better customer service from their healthcare service providers. And 77% of us want to book appointments online. The doctors who are offering those appointments online have done the math.

Xoova is poised to be the number one site (another number!) where those two elements...people wanting better customer service and doctors ready to offer it...come together.

The Time is Right for Insurance

One of my biggest pet peeves on the Internet is "Coming Soon." I go to a highly anticipated web site or venture and see nothing but a graphic of, say, a black crow [ahem] or, even worse, an animation of a construction worker.

I'm happy to say that the Xoova health plan "coming soon" is no more. And in good time. Consumers seeking new health plan providers for 2008 or entering their open enrollment periods need to find a good doctor who takes their insurance.

In comes Xoova.

This week, our developer finished tweaking the data and turned on the links so that patients can cut by insurer and location. Even better, Xoova visitors can now use our one box to enter in search terms like "aetna pediatrician phoenix" and get...whee! Dozens and dozens of results.

CEO Tommy McGloin and I went to visit some key influencers from the AlwaysOn Network yesterday. One of them admitted to suffering from a terrible ear infection. Within moments we found a number of local Otolaryngologists with enhanced profiles. Take that a step further and cut it by insurance and you have yourself a site unlike any other on the internet.

The Queue

Every day, the first thing I see when I log onto the internal "Xoova Administration Site" is the doctor queue. That is, the list of physicians who have come to www.xoova.com and requested a username and password so that they can update their own profiles.

I love the queue. I love the dynamic nature of the queue, where I log off to get a coffee and log back in to see two new names. I love seeing requests from prestigious institutions and large group practices, physicians of every specialty, practice administrators...all ready to share their philosophy of care, upload forms for patients, even offer appointments.

This week our VP of Business Development John Bader is in town meeting with West Coast contacts. The relationships he's built with individual doctors, practice administrators, medical societies and associations are key to the Xoova queue's steady growth.

So now we have more than 42,000 enhanced profiles. Some are great. We'd like for all 500,000+ doctors in our database to be this great. That's why, even as we implement new features, the first thing we see when we log on is "The Queue." It helps to remind us that even as we reach more and more patients, we have to first appeal to the doctors who provide their care.

Search Results Can Be Beautiful

There's something very powerful about simplicity. Google showed us a new way with "one-box" in the world of search. Last Friday, Xoova introduced our own one-box. It's a thing of sublime beauty...at least to us. And we hope to you.

There's not much to say about a one-box search, other than it gives you immense flexibility when you're searching  more than 40,000 enhanced profiles to find a doctor who treats a particular condition. And it's only going to get better as Xoova grows.

Take, for instance, someone in Seattle who wishes to find a doctor who treats arthritis. Firstly, what specialist do you see? A rheumatologist? Pain management physician? Orthopedic surgeon? And then where do you get information about which of these doctors has special expertise in arthritis? Okay, I'm showing off here, but type "arthritis seattle" in our search box on www.xoova.com and you'll see how useful the results are as compared to, say, the same search on Google.

We're not competing with Google. We love Google. We're climbing the ranks of Google so that more and more we're landing in the top ten results. But just like people go directly to say, IMDB.com for information on an actor, or to OpenTable to make restaurant reservations, we aim to be THE branded, easily navigable directory for people seeking doctors, medical services, and the ability to book appointments online.

Our dream is to have Xoova be on the tip of every patient's tongue by, oh, 2010. Maybe we should have some tongue depressors printed....

Every Week Better Than the Week Before

There's a great answer we give here at Xoova when people ask how things are going: "Every week is better than the week before." And it's no lie. More & more people coming to the site? Check. Climbing the ranks of Google results? Check. Still liking the co-workers? Check.

But last week. Last week was I think one of my favorite weeks at Xoova. Things came together like nobody's business. Highlights:

• Lead Developer who prefers to go unnamed worked his magic, and he came up with a redesigned site and search that I'm going to preview to you right now.
• Thanks to our SEO guru Chris Dolinar, users of the site who are "organic" significantly grew...that means that more and more people are accessing the site not from paid ads but from finding us as a natural search result on Google.
• We pulled off not one but two beautiful testimonials about Xoova for our MGMA affiliate relationship press release, which went out yesterday.
• Tommy did an awesome interview with the folks from CNET Network's BNET.

We'd love your feedback. Email us directly about the new site at info@xoova.com. 

How Can I Help?

I have a friend who says that "How Can I Help" is one of his favorite sentences. It's especially wonderful when it comes, say, from a member of your family when you're folding laundry.

Okay, so Xoova won't fold your laundry, but our aim is definitely to help.

Our goal, to be a "self evident site," means that everyone will quickly and easily be able to find the local doctor they need. As of 11:57am Tuesday, October 16th, we're not quite there yet. Fortunately, there is a human being at the Xoova Help Desk. That human being (me) uses these emails to help our developer determine what people are looking for, what's stumping our users in search, and how to make the site better.

Here are samples of email I was able to answer:

"Looking for James Lee MD @sloan kettering in Commack. Trying to find out something about him. Thanks"

"Do you have any information on a Dr. Alexander Stratienko in the Chattanooga, TN area?"

Here are samples of emails that helped us make the site better:

"Your site fails to locate an osteopath physician in either Charlottesville or Richmond, VA.  I can't believe there isn't one located in either of these cities."

"How can there be no orthopedic surgeons in Michigan? When I search by specialty and include Michigan, I get no results???"

And then there was this:

"I need to know if there are any Doctors that do Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation for treatment Please respond Thanks"

That one stumped me.

But good news. Xoova is on the cusp of making the terms within a doctor's enhanced profile searchable. People will be able to search, nationwide, on  treatments and procedures (no matter how obscure) that doctors include in their descriptions of personal clinical interests.

And they'll be able to search on a number of other things, too.

With the new search you'll be able to find a Harvard Educated Doctor who is practicing in Santa Monica. With the new search you'll be able to find a doctor who specializes in sleep apnea in Atlanta. And with the new search, you'll be able to find the doctor in Palo Alto who performs "transcranial magnetic stimulation."

His name is Brett Solvason.

Getting in Front of the Problem

It hasn't been an easy couple of weeks for some of the top physician networking/community sites on the Internet. I'm not here to pick on them. For the sake of Health 2.0, it's in everyone's best interest that their crisis communications teams successfully face questions about doctor authentication, dealing with potential imposters, and the threat of compromised anonymity.

What I am going to address is how Xoova has, does, and always will authenticate any physician who wishes to enhance his or her own profile and offer appointments. We use humans. If you are a doctor who wants to put a profile on our site, that's great. We love you. But once we do the regular authentication on the database side, we have a personal interaction with you and your practice before you get a username and password.

There's not much else to say about this. We're making sure we're doing everything we can to ensure the accuracy of our site and the integrity of our brand. It's part of the package. It's why we don't allow for one- to five-star style ratings on our site nor are we the forum for unchecked ranting and raving. Because doctors have a brand, too.