Specialist Healthcare Availability Across the United States - Web Scraping
Introduction
The availability of doctors and specialists in healthcare varies a lot based on the area. This is a research into availability of specialists doctors in different areas of the US. Getting the data required a bit of web scraping for information as it was not readily available. Web scraping is a process of analyzing existing data available online and collecting them into useful data that can be analysed. The project will let the users know the difference in quality and quantity of doctors available in specific cities compared to a places like Boston.
Generation of data
There are many sites that contain details on doctors available in an area. They include insurance websites and ratings websites. To get quality information, Vitals.com appeared to be one site that contains data that we need. The site is based on a dynamic JavaScript based design that prevented web scraping using urllib. In these cases, the web-scraping can be approached using Selenium web driver.
Using Selenium to scrape web data from vitals.com
The web-scraping program is capable of collecting data for various specialties in a specified location and is able to loop through multiple pages of data.
Next Steps
The data generated can be analyzed using the ZIP code to determine if there are enough specialized doctors in various fields across the country.
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