Patients can now rate docs online

From book reviews on Amazon.com to restaurant write-ups on Yelp, the Internet has emerged over the past decade as a key source of information for consumers.
But online ratings are now being used in areas far beyond retail products and services. A growing number of sites allow patients to publish assessments of their health care providers, whether that means local primary care physicians or elite plastic surgeons.
Physician-review sites run the gamut. At one extreme is RateMDs.com (which will look familiar to college students who have used its popular sister site, RateMyProfessors.com). The reviews on RateMDs are anonymous and brief – some glowing, some vituperative – and the people who run the site do not moderate comments.
A different model is employed by Angie’s List, which charges members a monthly fee to access user-generated information on local businesses and services. The site also publishes members’ names alongside their reviews, and allows businesses to respond to criticisms. In addition, the site’s operators will investigate questionable reports and remove them if necessary.
“What differentiates Angie’s List is the focus on the integrity of the ratings and the reviews,” said Angie Hicks, who founded the site in 1995. “That’s why members stick around with the service and come back to it year after year.”
Hicks started Angie’s List in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and it is now available in 124 cities nationwide. The Providence chapter, which was added in 2007, currently has about 3,000 members, Hicks said. The site initially focused on reviewing home contractors but has since expanded, and medical ratings were added a year ago after requests from members.
Eugene Mihaly, a Barrington retiree who has been a member of Angie’s List for a year, joined the site for its contractor reviews. Although he has not chosen any doctors based on the site’s recommendations, he has posted positive comments about some of his own physicians.
“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “If I were looking for a physician, and I had no other source that I trusted, I would certainly go to Angie’s List to see who they recommend, and then I would use other sources to check up on the recommendation.”
He added: “It’s a little different than if you’re looking for a plumber.”
Physician-review sites have been around for at least a decade, and “some are far better than others,” said Laura Adams, executive director of the Rhode Island Quality Institute, a nonprofit that promotes health-information innovation.
“In the beginning, these were seen as totally inappropriate,” said Adams, who argues that the medical community had discounted patients’ perceptions of quality for too long. “They’re really the only ones who can judge the quality of care in their eyes. And I think it’s important for practitioners to get that feedback.”
Still, some doctors are pushing back. A North Carolina physician has started a company, Medical Justice, that sells doctors a standard nondisclosure form they can ask patients to sign.
So far, though, the rating sites are mostly a nonissue for doctors in Rhode Island, said Steven DeToy, director of government and public affairs at the Rhode Island Medical Society. Most people still choose their doctors based on referrals or recommendations from family and friends, he said.
“I think it’s another example of the Internet making a whole bunch of new things possible for the general public,” DeToy said, adding: “If [doctors] are staying up at night worrying about it, they’re not calling me.”
But DeToy also cautioned against patients relying too heavily on the ratings sites. “I suspect, like restaurant reviews, it may tend to be … people who had a super-great experience or a lousy experience,” he said. “Most of these are not vetted.”
Hicks said Angie’s List and similar sites are really just a new way for patients to get the same information on local physicians that they already get from family discussions or driveway chats with neighbors.
Although the response from physicians has been “a mixed bag,” Hicks said she has heard from “lots of health care providers who are very supportive of the movement to ratings.” In addition, she said, “people get really nervous that it’s just going to be people out there complaining. That’s not at all the case.” The majority of the reports on Angie’s List are positive, she said.
Everyone agrees that the new sites are part of a broader societal shift. “We shouldn’t feel singled out in health care – it’s happening in lots of other industries as well,” said Adams, who described the sites as part of a “transparency movement.”
She continued: “People really need much more in the way of understanding how to make decisions about their health care and how to take more control and be more accountable for their own personal health, so people are turning to these kinds of sites.” &#8226