Patent ID: 8428964

Claim:
A method for using a computerized system for matching healthcare consumers to healthcare producers comprising the steps of: providing a producer interface to the system for each of a plurality of healthcare producers to interact with the system over the Internet; providing a consumer interface to the system for each of a plurality of healthcare consumers to interact with the system over the internet, wherein said consumer interface presents a standardized quality assessment of each one of the producers; accepting, via the producer interface, one or more available products and/or available services listings from each of a plurality of healthcare producers; accepting, via the consumer interface, a request from one consumer who is one of said plurality of consumers regarding a desired healthcare product or service; searching, using the system, the plurality of products and/or services listed by the plurality of producers for a subset of said products and/or services that are a close match to the requested desired healthcare product or service; providing a list of one or more items of said subset of products and/or services for display to the one consumer; offering said items on said list of items for purchase by the one consumer; for any one or more items of said offered items accepted for purchase by the one consumer, performing the steps of: accepting payment information regarding the accepted purchase(s) by the one consumer for the one or more items purchased, allocating a portion of said payment(s) to the producer(s) corresponding to the purchased item(s), requesting and receiving, from the one consumer, quality information about each one of the one or more purchased items, and allocating a remaining portion of said payment, if any, to a representative of the system; and using said quality information provided by the one consumer for calculating an updated standardized quality assessment for the producer(s) of the one or more purchased items.