DocDelta

What it does

DocDelta is the talent engine for healthcare. Like Moneyball for physician recruitment, DocDelta enables hospitals and healthcare recruiters to find the best doctors who are interested in moving jobs. We have an advanced search facility covering physicians across the USA, providing rich candidate profiles for potential employers.

Inspiration

We were inspired by companies like Gild and Entelo who are trying to do predictive recruitment for software developers on the West Coast. We decided to leverage our expertise in healthcare technology to fix a similar problem for physician recruitment, since doctors are similarly high-value employees with urgent supply needs.

How we built it

DocDelta is a web-based SaaS product. The user friendly UI is built with Bootstrap and JQuery. The database is populated by hundreds of gigabytes of data, sourced from government, medical, and social sources. It is managed by MySQL. The predictive algorithm was developed using Spark and R.

Challenges we ran into—and how we addressed them

When we started, we expected to be able to use a lot of social data from Facebook, LinkedIn etc. However, we swiftly learned that physicians are really quite poor users of social media, with less than fifteen percent of them on LinkedIn. So we had to look to other sources to learn about physicians' behavior. This led us to dive deep into government sources like CMS, Medicare, and physician referral information, which provided a robust source of reliable information about doctors' practices.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The accuracy of our predictive algorithm: For every 10 physicians which move jobs, we accurately predict 5 of them—this is 5 times better than random.
The reach of our tool: Our product is live and actively tracking every physician in 30 US States.
The response from clients: Hospitals are blown away by the insights they get about their own organizations, as well as their competitors.

What's next for DocDelta

We're focused on getting our tool to new clients—mainly hospital systems and physician recruiters. We are also raising money to fund various development goals like improving predictive accuracy and enhancing user experience.