A doctor’s profile on Amino provides an overview of their experience treating certain health conditions. In some cases, this overview may include percentile badges (e.g. “Top 5%,” “Top 15%,” “Top 25%”) to highlight doctors who see high numbers of patients with specific conditions, compared to similar doctors nationwide. (Note: If you do not see a summary of a doctor’s experience on their profile, it indicates that we do not have enough data to report on that particular doctor’s experience treating specific conditions.)
How Amino determines the conditions a doctor treats
Defining conditions on Amino
Amino looks at the medical billing codes that appear on electronic health insurance claims from doctor-patient interactions. Because there are hundreds of thousands of unique medical billing codes used to describe different healthcare interactions, Amino groups billing codes that describe similar health conditions or services into a single category that we display on our website with a user-friendly name (e.g. “diabetes,” “asthma,” “knee replacement”).
Determining the conditions and related services displayed on doctor profiles
To determine which conditions a doctor is most likely to treat, we analyze our database of health insurance claims. We identify the conditions for which the doctor sees the most patients, as well as conditions the doctor treats less frequently but at a higher rate than similar doctors (which can help identify doctors with particular expertise treating rarer conditions). We display up to 30 conditions for each doctor to give a broad (but not exhaustive) picture of what the doctor treats. The top few conditions we show on each doctor’s profile are the conditions for which they see the most patients.
Let’s say you search Amino for doctors with experience treating allergies and get matched with an allergist named Dr. A. Their Amino profile shows that they have experience treating patients for allergies as well as asthma, hay fever, and lung conditions. To determine that Dr. A has experience treating patients for these conditions, we look at claims data and count the number of patients that Dr. A has seen for each condition. If we determine that Dr. A treats patients for allergies, asthma, hay fever, and lung conditions more often than other conditions, or if Dr. A frequently sees patients for conditions that similar providers tend not to see frequently, we surface up to 30 of those conditions on Dr. A’s profile.
For some conditions on doctor profiles, we also show services the doctor provides to patients with those conditions. We identify related services for a given condition by measuring patient volume for services the doctor commonly performs for patients with that condition. For example, a related service for “allergies” could be “allergy shots.”
How we determine a doctor’s experience badge
On some doctor profiles, you might find a badge that says the doctor ranks within a top percentile for a specific condition. Amino developed experience badges for doctors so that people can understand how certain doctors compare to other doctors nearby or nationwide.
To assign an experience badge, we rank doctors by the number of patients they treated for each condition from 2014–2017. We give doctors a badge if they are among the top-ranked doctors for that condition, meaning they see a lot of patients compared to other doctors. Currently, we show badges for doctors who rank in the Top 5%, Top 15%, and Top 25% for the particular conditions they treat. These percentile badges allow you to compare doctors based on their experience.
For example, let’s say you do a search for doctors with experience treating allergies on Amino and get matched with an allergist named Dr. B. Their Amino profile shows a badge that reads “Top 5% - allergy patients (USA)”. This means that Dr. B saw more patients for allergies than 95% of similar doctors nationwide in 2014–2017.
If you search for conditions or procedures on Amino to get matched with doctors, the experience badge you see on doctor profiles will be based on how that doctor ranks nationwide. If you choose to look up your doctor by name on Amino, or land on a doctor’s profile via a search engine like Google, the experience badge you see will be based on how that doctor compares to similar doctors within the same metropolitan statistical area (MSA).
Experience badges represent the overall experience a doctor has treating patients for a specific condition. When performing personalized searches on Amino, you may sometimes see doctors with lower experience badges ranked above doctors with higher experience badges. If you see results like this, it means the doctors at the top of your search results have proportionately more experience treating patients of your sex or closer to your age. Read more about how we calculate your matches on Amino here.
If you have questions about how we determine a doctor’s experience, contact us at insights@amino.com.