Frequently Asked Questions
How Does it Work?
ApexMD is an advanced physician search engine driven by a medical taxonomy. ApexMD is able to order physicians by relevance to the searched disease or procedure because of our in-depth understanding of physician specialization, training and practice patterns and our ability to standardize the physician profiling process across medical centers and regions. The medical "intelligence" of our search engine provides accuracy and depth that goes beyond simple word indexing. Our physician founders, together with their colleagues, have catalogued over 8,000 diseases and procedures and tens of thousands of related medical terms (synonyms) and created a relevancy mapping between each disease and procedure and one or more of over 500 medical specialties, subspecialties or areas of concentration.
Our crawling engine crawls the web looking for profiles on doctors at top medical centers in order to determine their specialty, subspecialty/area of concentration and specific special interests. With this information, we are able to associate physicians, with varying degrees of relevancy, with each disease or procedure in our database. The level of a physician's association with the searched disease or procedure is reflected in our 'Match Score'.
In addition to physician profiles that are created by our webcrawling process, we also invite physicians to add their own profiles through our Physician Sign-Up system. Physicians who have an existing profile in ApexMD but would like to enhance or update their profile may do so by locating their profile in our system through the name search box and clicking 'Is this You?' at the bottom of the profile.
If a searched disease or procedure is associated with a physician's specialty, subspecialty and special interests you see check marks next to these categories in the search results. If a disease is associated with only the physician's specialty but is not associated with their subspecialty or clinical interests then they will typically appear lower in a search result than their peers who more directly address the condition. If the disease or procedure is not associated with the physician's specialty, subspecialty or special interests then they will not appear in our search results.
ApexMD works on the principle that the greater amount of clinical emphasis that a physician devotes to any one particular disease or subspecialty/area of concentration then the greater the likelihood that they will be relevant for that specific disease or diseases that have been mapped by ApexMD to that subspecialty/area of concentration. Conversely, a more generalist physician, with less emphasis on any one subspecialty or specific disease, will be relevant for a greater number of diseases though they are less likely to be listed as the most relevant physician for any one disease.