• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 5, 2010

Insider Pages, a Citysearch subsidiary and IAC operating unit, plans to release Wednesday a tool dubbed Doctor Finder aimed at making it easier for people to make critical choices based on a variety of sources. The tool brings ratings and reviews from patients to the medical industry, adding a layer of user-generated content to the basic information, such as gender, age and specialties typically found on sites.

Now people can search for information on specific criteria for doctors, dentists or medical specialists. They also can share reviews and rank doctors based on nine factors, such as ease of making an appointment, whether they felt the doctor spent sufficient time with them, and if the doctor listened to and answered their questions. Health insurance agencies own much of the information found on the Web, and they're just not in the business of moderating patient reviews or making available the track records of doctors.

The search feature allows people to search for doctors based on insurance, specialty, patient reviews, location, gender, language, and credentials and track record of the doctors. Data on the site, such as board certifications and malpractice suits, comes from a partnership with third-party company HealthGrades. It gives people searching through Insider Pages access to 1.2 million patient ratings and 15 data points on more than 800,000 doctors.

"We'll allow people to filter doctors to search by experience," says Eric Peacock, general manager at Insider Pages. "You would think 'experience' means years, but we found through research that some people want a doctor with about 10 years experience, but they don't want one who's 80 years old."

With the recent passage of the healthcare reform bill, millions of Americans enter the healthcare system in the coming years will turn toward search engines and sites to find information on doctors and services. Insider Pages racks up about 6.5 million unique visitors, and 15 million page views per month.

Similar to Citysearch and Yelp, Insider Pages generates money from pay-per-performance advertising based off the content on the page. As the company moves toward dentists and doctors, marketing and advertising opportunities will transition into lead generation instead, Peacock says. "It won't happen at the launch, but we are headed that way to complement our advertising," he says. "Aside from pay-per-performance ads, there's a lucrative media ad opportunity with pharmaceutical companies that want to run branding-type ads."

Online advertising and search engine marketing will promote the new tools, Peacock says. Other opportunities are through links through healthcare companies, but Insider Pages ranks well on Google, he says.

Research from MicroMass Communications released today segments people into several groups distinguished by personality traits and social media habits. The four groups include Power Socialites, Sincere Influentials, Solo Escapists, and Independent Achievers.

The Cosmo-type quiz determines the social media status related to healthcare. The group put together a whitepaper to identify behavior types.

Power Socialites are the most likely to find sites like Insider Pages by searching on engines. They enjoy being in the spotlight, consider themselves early adopters; and use social media to voice their opinions, meet others, and expand their personal visibility. Favorite sites include Facebook and Match.com. This group tends to get sick more often, look for and buy well-advertised brands, and not eat a balanced diet. Many claim that friends ask their advice about health and nutrition.

So how will Insider Pages keep people coming back to give up the reviews? Peacock says it will take a delicate hand to market the site. One possibility is making a donation to a charity for each review.