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 Most doctors typically have no more than a few reviews on a site,
and the reviews often don’t provide good insight into the doctor’s
qualifications, personality or the patient experience, a new study
finds.
“Many friends have called me and said they want to find information
about a doctor, but when they look online, they can’t find
anything,” said lead author Tara Lagu of the Center for Quality of
Care Research at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield,
Massachusetts.
“Although consumers can look on state licensing board websites to
research lawsuits and criminal information, it seems what they’re
really looking for is a review from fellow patients to find a doctor
who shares their values,” Lagu told Reuters Health.
During September 2016, Lagu and colleagues searched for public
websites that allow patients to review doctors in the U.S., didn’t
require a subscription and had search capabilities. They found 28
sites that met their criteria and looked for information on a
randomly selected list of 600 doctors in three cities: Boston,
Dallas and Portland, Oregon.
All but two of the sites included an overall “star” rating for
doctors, and all collected narrative comments but two didn’t make
them public. The most commonly used sites seem to be
Healthgrades.com, Vitals.com, UCompareHealthCare.com and RateMDs.com.
Across the 28 websites, more than 8,000 reviews had 1,784 narrative
comments for the 600 doctors. About a third of the doctors didn’t
have a review on any website, and those who had at least one review
were likely to have only three or four. In some cases, the
narratives were repeats written on more than one site, Lagu and
colleagues report in JAMA.
“Word used to spread by mouth, and doctors who looked the part often
got the business,” said Thomas Lee, Boston-based chief medical
officer for Press Ganey, a patient satisfaction survey company.
“That’s clearly going by the wayside and moving online, which is not
just for the younger generation but their parents as well.”
About 60 percent of consumers looking for information about doctors
online say reviews are important, according to a 2014 study
published in JAMA.
“Consumers should still be careful about what they view on these
sites,” said David Hanauer of the University of Michigan at Ann
Arbor, lead author of the 2014 paper.
“It’s hard to know what is real, and it’s hard to make a fair
assessment with so few ratings,” Hanauer, who wasn’t involved with
the current study, told Reuters Health by email. “If consumers use
these sites, they should visit multiple sites to get a more complete
picture before making any decisions.”
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Rather than rely on commercial sites to produce accurate
information, doctors and health systems could use their own patient
surveys to publish this type of information online, Lagu said. Since
healthcare laws require them to collect patient experience numbers
and narratives, they can post data onto doctors’ profile pages.
Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, for example,
posts a star rating and lists patient narratives, which average 30
to 100 reviews per doctor.
“The limitation is that this is expensive to implement, so it may
not be available for smaller hospitals or health systems,” Lagu
added. “Also, health systems would control the data, so not all
comments may be posted and not anyone could just post a comment.”
Similarly, federal agencies such as the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services are researching the possibility of posting patient
narratives on sites such as Physician Compare, the searchable
website for patients with Medicare.
“The federal government has put great emphasis on physician quality
reporting such as the Physician Compare program,” said Gordon Gao of
the University of Maryland in College Park, who wasn’t involved with
the current study.
Although commercial doctor-rating sites don’t say much about
physician quality, they’re a start when it comes to patient
experience, Gao and colleagues wrote in a 2015 JAMA Internal
Medicine article.
“Abundant evidence suggests that physicians are not created equal,
and there is substantial variation in the quality of physicians,”
Gao told Reuters Health by email. “These (federal) programs have
great potential to change the landscape of public reporting.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2lK1bqg JAMA, online February 21, 2017.
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