Salted caramel ice cream. Jumbo lump crab cakes. Duck-fat French fries. These are just a few of the reasons I recently spent far too much time on dishtip.com. Self-described as “a sophisticated food discovery application that analyzes millions of reviews, photos and related content across the Web to help you find the best dishes at restaurants” Dish Tip is a nifty little app for anyone traveling in a new city or looking to satisfy a specific craving in their own backyard.  For example, (and I promise this relates to medical travel eventually), if you’re in Baltimore (maybe a PepsiCo employee getting care) and you just have to have something as specific as cilantro, Dish Tip will drill down and find you the top dishes in the Baltimore area with cilantro as a key ingredient. Beyond ingredients, it also searches by courses, flavors, cuisines and prices.  Plus, you can exclude what you don’t want (i.e. coconut or meat or Mexican). So as I sat drooling at all the food options available to me, I was struck by the notion that a similar granular search is what’s needed in medical travel. Similar to choosing a restaurant, there are certain parameters to consumer healthcare selection. For example, an individual knows they need their hip replaced. They know they aren’t a candidate for a particular device. They know how much they have to spend. They know they want JCI-accredited. They know they don’t want to travel more than ‘x’ miles from home. They know they need rehabilitation services after. And so on… So why not a similar application that searches and sorts their options online? You think about it while I go get something to eat.