Focus Areas

What is it?

Ribbon Provider Focus Areas enable you to personalize provider recommendations by surfacing rich information on the conditions a provider treats, treatments a provider performs, and provider-patient panel demographics. “Clinical Areas” describes the general area of expertise for a given provider (e.g., Knee, Wrist). “Conditions” describes the areas a patient would need care (e.g., “knee pain”). “Treatments” are the types of procedures that a provider performs to treat a given condition (e.g., “knee x-ray,” “knee scope”). “Patient panel” demographics describe the types of patients a provider usually sees based on age and gender.

Ribbon users can use focus areas to power a more accurate search experience, replacing (or augmenting) searches by specialty or procedure.

Why is it useful?

Medical specialties are often not specific enough to find the particular type of care that a patient needs, requiring calls to multiple practices to find one that fits. Ribbon’s focus areas allow you to quickly and confidently drill down to the subset of providers that are a good fit for the patient.

Methodology

Ribbon compiles focus areas from a database with billions of claims to identify the most common diagnoses and procedures a provider delivers alongside aggregate demographic information of the patients they treat. Ribbon’s algorithms sift through a large volume of claims data to cluster similar CPT and ICD-10 codes together to create a more useful taxonomy of procedures and diagnoses for search purposes. We then apply a topic modeling approach to identify the subset of procedures and diagnoses that accurately represent a provider’s focus.

FAQs

• Why doesn’t a specific provider have any Focus Areas?
  -> We largely rely on claims to populate our Focus Areas dataset. A provider may not have enough claims available to assign a given focus area with statistical significance. In these instances, we believe it's more impactful to not assign any focus area to the given provider. Alternatively, the provider may focus on more uncommon specialties that aren't currently captured by Ribbon's Focus Areas.