How Does Your Doctor Rate?
One of the good things about the internet is the way it offers consumers a chance to interact and compare notes on a given subject. When we book our physicians for medical conferences, it is handy to have guest reviews of given hotels in places we're unfamiliar, to get a sense of the quality of service.
Reading the reviews, you can sometimes figure that a person is nursing a personal grudge or just had a bad time, or on the opposite end possibly working for the hotel in some capacity. Still, most of the reviews I've come across are pretty straight forward and helpful.
But what about applying that same consumer test to doctors? Recently, I visited the site RateMD.com, where patients can name doctors and offer their opinion as to the quality of their work. Based on a five-point scale, the categories available are Staff (poor service/good service), Punctuality (not on time/on time), Helpfulness (very unhelpful/very helpful), Knowledge (unknowledgeable/knowledgable).
There is also a space to note what insurance company was used, the amount paid, and a section for comments. The latter categories of Helpfulness and Knowledge are tabulated to give an overall score which is manifested by a either a smiley face or a frown.
The site is very user-friendly, and interesting, but as a medical professional, I will admit to a certain amount of trepidation. It's one thing for an average person to criticize the quality of, say, a hotel room, or restaurant meal, but to decide on whether or not a doctor is knowledgeable about their specialty is a completely different can of worms. Often, the patient is only looking at their narrow range of problems, and it's possible that they have misunderstood or misinterpreted something.
While it seems very easy for a doctor to be penalized, it also seems possible for the opposite to also happen. Incompetent doctors who get lucky or have a good bedside manner could get a rave review by someone who doesn't have the proper information necessary to make a good value judgment. Just listen to some of the negative and positive comments I came across:
- "The doctor is a kind, helpful, and compassionate physician. He calls you in and leads you back to the examining room himself."
- "Only had a consult with this doctor, but left feeling like I was putting him out. He didn't listen at all and had his own agenda. If someone has had good work done by him, consider yourself lucky. I definitely got the feeling he is an LA doc in it for the big money. I am not new to this and have had wonderful, ethical, skilled doctors before. He is not one of them!"
There is nothing wrong with making the practice of medicine more accessible to the average layperson, and I'm not condemning this site completely. I just wonder if doctors shouldn't be held to a higher standard than one that offers a smiley face as a seal of approval. As usual, I am curious what you think? Have any of your staff doctors been rated? Do you think it's a good thing?
posted by Anne @ 5:48 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
On the surface, the concept seems like a good one. But I'm afraid the data can be easily skewed by one or two people.
We like to survey our patients and send out a fairly simple form asking for responses. The key to meaningful results, of course, is to have a decent sample size.
There is no such assurance of representative with this site. In its current design, I think it may be fatally flawed.
Administrators have always known that one bad patient encounter will lead that patient to tell ten other potential patients about that encounter. One good encounter is only relayed to one other potential patient. In this case I saw the reviews of two local physicians. One I would trust my life with, the other, I would not allow to provide service if the physician was the only one in town. Unfortunately, they both received the highest ratings.
What I know versus what the general public may know does not give me a great deal of confidence. Perception is everything. The site is not comprehensive, it has potential to be one of the great "gossip" sites on the web today. All quality indictors I have seen so far do not fairly indicate how a physician may handle a give situation, and each patient is a little bit different.
The "Art" of practicing medicine can only be minimally quantified. This site makes no attempt to do anything except post bad perceptions.
This site is not a good idea. Most people post comments only when they have a negative experience. How valuable is this information to the potential patient? not very, in my opinion.
I think online patient satisfaction rating can be quite valuable. I'm a dermatologist and started www.DrScore.com because I saw how helpful patient feedback was and thought that the Internet would be a very efficient way to collect the data. The DrScore.com site does put doctors' overall scores on the web for people to see. Few people realize how much patients love their doctors, so putting a representative patient satisfaction score on the web is going to be to the advantage of doctors. My score is 9.0 out of 10, and that puts me in the BOTTOM 25% of the doctors with 20 or more ratings.
We have a bit over 500 doctors asking their patients to rate them at DrScore.com as a way to get feedback. It's easy for the practice, can be done year round, and costs very little. Like your hotel example, you can ask for feedback from every patient letting them know the practice cares about them. It seems a great way to collect patient satisfaction data, and let's practice administrators know how they compare to other practices.
The other commenters on this site are correct that there are potential flaws. DrScore does try to identify when a patient is putting in multiple negative scores and tries to block those. So far, that seems to be a very rare event.
There are other patient satisfaction survey services out there. I think more doctors ought to be doing patient satisfaction surveys regularly. If not with DrScore.com, there are plenty of other ways to do it.
Steve Feldman, MD, PhD
sfeldman@DrScore.com
Why would rating Dr's be any different than rating a hotel? Recently, I had to find a new MD for my husband and when I did a search on google I was *very* pleased to see that Google maps not only listed the Dr.'s but you are able to rate them. I went right over any practice that had zero ratings.
I went ahead and added my own evaluation of my Dr.
Post a Comment
<< Home