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Embrace Physician Rating Sites, Improve Patient Experience

 |  By Marianne@example.com  
   August 18, 2010

Doctor rating sites have long been a contentious topic among hospital leaders, marketers, and clinicians. Most are wary, believing such sites are a popularity contest and don't give enough weight to quality of care and positive outcomes. But some understand that—like them or not—these sites are here to say and that the reviews contain valuable insight that can be used to improve care.

Tara Lagu, M.D., a healthcare researcher at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, MA, belongs to the latter camp. She studies social networking as a tool in patient care and quality improvement and recently published a paper on consumer sites that rate doctors, according to The Boston Globe.

"From the patient side, I think social media really offer an opportunity to become engaged in the process of improving health care quality," she told The Globe. "Patient satisfaction is so important, and so far in our attempt to improve quality I think this has been an area we tend to think about the least."

And although patients may not be able to give much feedback into the clinical aspects of their care, their comments can help physicians understand a broader view of the patient experience.

"I think doctors don't recognize the whole patient experience, but patients do," she told the paper. "Whether the parking was accessible and whether the receptionist was polite and whether they got into the room and sat for 45 minutes or whether they were seen promptly and were able to communicate with the doctor in a way that was pleasing to them. It is notable we saw very few reviews saying they got the wrong diagnosis, or surgery was bad."

The interview with Lagu prompted me to do a little investigation of my own. I'm familiar with consumer rating and review sites such as Yelp and Rate My Professors, but I've never looked up a doctor. So I decided to search for my brother's spine surgeon, who's the head of pediatric orthopedics at a prominent Boston hospital. I searched for him on yelp.com, ratemds.com, drscore.com, and vitals.com—the top three results when I Googled "doctor ratings."

The first three searches came back with nothing, but vitals.com had an entry for with six ratings and three sets of comments. He averaged 3.4 out of 6 points for promptness, courteous staff, accurate diagnosis, bedside manner, spends time with me, and follow up and a 3.5 for ease of appointment. These aren't exactly telling statistics, but it's interesting that six of the seven questions revolve around patient experience while just one addresses clinical care.

The comments, initially, aren't any more helpful: "THE BEST DOCTOR I HAVE EVER SEEN; Caring, intelligent, compassionate," "Fantastic, caring doctor," and "[He] treated me with care and made me feel safe!" Each commenter gave the physician four out of six possible points in each category.

Since the Internet is often a sounding board for people to anonymously vent, I was surprised that each of these comments was positive—especially since we can tell some people gave him lower ratings because the average scores are lower than the commenter's ratings. This should also make healthcare leaders breathe a sigh of relief. Unsolicited online patient feedback isn't all negative.

This quick research also shows that online doctor rating sites aren't quite mainstream—yet. So marketers have a chance to get out in front of this trend and draft a strategy. You might consider:

  • Researching which sites are most active in your market.
  • Directing patients to a specific site to rank their physician after each visit, like some realtors or retailers do.
  • Tasking a staffer with scouring ratings sites to keep tabs on how your organization's top physicians fair.
  • Should you make physicians aware of doctor rating sites and explaining the features.

By considering questions like these now, your organization can solicit and harness patient feedback in a way that allows you to improve care, patient experience, and your hospital's reputation.

Marianne Aiello is a contributing writer at HealthLeaders Media.

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