Imaginary Landscape, LLC

In a year-long study concluding in August 2004, the Midwest Business Group on Health, under a grant from The Commonwealth Fund, conducted an evaluation of newly-released online physician directory recommendations from the National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA).

The study concluded that online physician directories are "frequently difficult to use, not objective, or contain information that is old, inaccurate, or incomplete."

An exception is Advocate Health Care's Doctor Directory, which was highlighted as one of four Web sites "that incorporate many of the NCQA recommendations."

Imaginary Landscape, a Chicago-based Web development firm with 25 hospital clients, designed the Advocate doctor directory. Working closely with Advocate, Imaginary Landscape utilized sophisticated tools to display the wealth of physician data offered by Advocate in a simple, searchable format. These tools include:

• Open source, relational database for fast searches.
• Nightly, automated updates from the internal "master" database to the online "slave" database.
• Automatic increase in geographic radius for ZIP code searches that produce three or fewer physicians.
• Special cross links between a physician listing and any articles referencing the physician, allowing users more opportunity to research physicians.
• Extensive use of advanced JavaScript to support unlimited office locations without cluttering search results.

The complete report is available from The Commonwealth Fund web site at http://www.cmwf.org.

The Advocate Doctor Directory is located at http://www.advocatehealth.com/db/physref/.