This is the 'SCORE YOUR DOCTOR' area of the DrScore.com website. Here you can search to find your doctor using different combinations of information, and rate how satisfied you are with various aspects of the care you receive. A good place to start your search is using the LAST NAME and STATE. The search engine will alert you when it needs.
Doctors aren't bistros. They aren't laundry services, movies or computers, either. They aren't even douches (or other health-related products). While you can find websites that have enough reliable customer reviews to help choose each of these products and services, a study recently published in JAMA determined that the same is not true for doctors. (By the way, many doctors recommend against douching...and douches.)
Last September, a team of researchers (Tara Lagu, M.D., M.P.H.; Aruna Priya, M.A., M.Sc.; Sarah L. Goff, M.D.; and Peter K. Lindenauer, M.D., M.Sc. from Baystate Medical Center and Katherine Metayer from Colby College, Michael Moran from the College of the Holy Cross and Leidy Ortiz from Tufts University) searched the Internet for websites that allowed patients to rate doctors. They initially found 66 websites and then eventually narrowed the list down to 28, after excluding websites that restricted who could leave, search for, read or leave reviews or were focused on a single specialty or insurance plan. Then they looked up a random sample of 600 physicians from Boston, Massachusetts; Portland, Oregon; and Dallas, Texas.
How did the researchers rate these websites that rated doctors? Not very well. The search capabilities for a majority of the sites were not good. Only four sites allowed users to search for doctors by gender, five sites by clinical condition, 15 by hospital affiliation, three by languages spoken, and nine by insurance accepted. This would be fine if you didn't care about whether you had a problem that the doctor could handle, could talk to the doctor or could pay the doctor. But for many people, these things are kind of important.
How reliable were the reviews? Well, right off the bat, 34% of the sampled physicians did not even have a single review on any of the websites. Then, of the remaining 66% of the sampled physicians, the median number of total reviews for each physician was seven. For the websites Healthgrades.com and Vitals.com, each physician had a median of four reviews. For Lifescript.com, the median was three reviews. For UCompareHealthCare.com, RateMDs.com , DrScore.com, Wellness.com, Yelp.com and Googleplus.com, the median was two reviews or less.
What exactly can you tell from two reviews? Well, if they are both bad reviews, that means the doctor has two people in the entire world who have Internet access that don't like him or her (depending on the web site, you may not even be able to tell if the doctor's a him or her). Yes, there's no way of verifying whether those two people even actually saw the doctor. Heck, you don't even know if those two people are actually two different people or just one person leaving two reviews. A vengeful ex, a jealous friend or even a random troll could have left the reviews. What if both reviews are positive? Maybe, just maybe, the doctor and someone in the doctor's office could be leaving good reviews for themselves. But, of course, as talk show host Conan O’Brien once said, 'No one lies on the Internet.'
Basing your choice of doctor on just two, just seven or even just 20 reviews is a bit like taking career advice from YouTube comments. Websites such as Yelp rely on crowdsourcing, attracting enough people to leave ratings and reviews to drown out the fake or biased reviews. Seven people is not a crowd, no matter what angle you photograph them. Twenty people isn't either. Think about it. One person with a computer and an hour of time could crank out at least a couple dozen reviews, posing as a 60-year old woman with too much gas for one review, a 35-year old guy with uncontrollable itching for another review and so forth.
Is there a Yelp for selecting doctors? Yes and no. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The other issue is that evaluating a physician is much more difficult than evaluating a restaurant. For example, getting a rectal exam is not the same as eating crème brulée, unless you eat crème brulée in a really weird way. While it is easier to tell whether a dish tastes good, many patients may not really know how competent a doctor may be. A doctor may smile and act friendly, but is he or she really a good doctor? Moreover, while a restaurant or a store tries to standardize a product or service, you can't quite standardize doctors in the same way. Patients, health problems and treatments are complex, and a doctor needs to tailor care each patient. Finally, a good doctor doesn't always do what a patient wants and instead should do what a patient needs (e.g., a doctor who refuses to give opioid pain medications may not be popular with a patient).
So while websites can help you choose many different products and services, they currently aren't very good at helping you choose a doctor. It's better to rely on other methods, which I've detailed for Forbes previously, unless you would like a handful of strangers who don't know you determine your healthcare.
The proliferation of “rate my doctor” websites has prompted Canada’s largest medical malpractice insurer to offer advice to physicians on how to manage their cyber reputations.
Among their recommendations: Take the feedback as “objectively as possible.” Don’t ask patients to post positive reviews or sign agreements they won’t write negative ones. Never respond online even if they are certain which patient made the posting.
“Rather than turn a blind eye to these ratings, doctors should consider monitoring what is being said about them, and take measured steps to deal with these reviews,” the Ottawa-based Canadian Medical Protective Association says.
In the era of social media, doctor-rating sites are growing. The sites allow patients to post anonymous comments about their doctors and rave — or rant — about everything from how long they’re kept waiting for appointments to their medical care. But they’ve also drawn ire from doctors’ groups who say physicians are hamstrung by confidentiality issues and can’t respond to negative online reviews without risking breaching patient privacy rules.
The Canadian Medical Protective Association (CMPA) is advising doctors they generally won’t “extend assistance” to physicians wishing to bring a civil action against a website or a patient over negative reviews. However, the malpractice insurer has prepared a form letter physicians can send to sites demanding they take down comments they consider defamatory.
“Physicians tend to get very upset with (online) criticism,” said Dr. Douglas Bell, associate executive director of the CMPA. “People who go into medicine generally go into it with an altruistic purpose. So when they see criticism they tend not to be objective and look at it (instead) more sort of as an attack on their professionalism,” he said.
But online reviews can also act as a reality check for a doctor “to see if there is something going on that you might not be aware of, or that you might be aware of but it’s more problematic than you thought,” Bell said.
A U.S. study published this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that a quarter of 3,500 people surveyed reported using online doctor rating sites.
Of those, 35 per cent said they chose a doctor based on good ratings and 37 per cent had avoided a doctor with bad reviews.
“There are many more people using these sites than we originally thought,” said lead author Dr. David Hanauer, of the University of Michigan Medical School.
RateMDs.com, the largest physician-rating site in Canada, has grown from only tens of thousands of unique visitors per year when it first launched in the U.S. in 2004, to more than 30 million unique visits per year today.
The site has ratings for more than two million doctors from across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
Despite what doctors fear, studies suggest online doctor reviews are largely positive: In one study published in 2010, researchers who studied 33 physician-rating websites for reviews of a random sample of 300 Boston doctors found most ratings — 88 per cent — were positive, six per cent were negative and six per cent were neutral.
They also found several “narrative” and glowing reviews that appeared to be written by the doctors themselves.
Ratemymd.ca (screengrab)
“Rate your doctor” sites offer a novel way for patients “to provide information about physician performance,” the authors wrote in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
But others caution there’s no way of knowing for certain which comments are fake and that people are far more likely to complain about bad experiences than good ones.
“A lot of (doctors) don’t feel they are a true measure of their work,” Hanauer, of the University of Michigan, said.
When RateMDs expanded into Canada, “we got a lot of very upset doctors calling the CMPA suggesting that they were being defamed,” said Bell.
But defamation is in the eyes of the beholder, he said.
Some of the most egregious comments — “this doctor is incompetent, I wouldn’t take my dog to him” — could clearly be considered defamatory “because, actually, an authority licenses them, so it’s unlikely they’re incompetent,” Bell said.
But similar comments from multiple patients are likely a sign that a problem is serious and needs addressing, he said.
“What we’re really saying (to doctors) is, why don’t you check them out? See what people are saying,” Bell said. “It may lead to an opportunity for improvement.”