Jarrod Shapiro, DPM
Practice Perfect Editor
Assistant Professor,
Dept. of Podiatric Medicine,
Surgery & Biomechanics
College of Podiatric Medicine
Western University of
Health Sciences,
St, Pomona, CA

Physician Online Ratings:
Welcome to the Modern World

In the past, word of mouth was a key method for a podiatric physician to build his or her practice. Provide excellent service with good results, and your happy patients will tell their friends and families, they'll tell their friends and families, and on and on until you have patients busting down the doors to see you — at least in a perfect world.

Enter modern technology and the Internet.

Over the past several years, websites advertising physician online ratings have increased in both volume and power. Today, if a prospective patient wants to see how I compare with other physicians, he can utilize any number of websites that – for a fee – will provide a rating about me.

Is this a good thing? The following is a list of some popular online sites that provide physician ratings and information:

Google
HealthGrades

RateMDs
Doctor Score Card

Angie’s List • Yelp
Consumers’ CHECKBOOK

On these sites, your patients can find out various pieces of professional information about you, besides a rating, such as specialty, state licensure, address, insurances accepted, etc. They can also contribute ratings of you, your staff and your practice.

Dont forget to get yourself something of value for the holidays.

I've Been Rated...Have You ?

I decided to use myself as an experiment to demonstrate the problems with these online ratings. I looked myself up on a couple of these ratings sites to see just how this system works. My name didn’t come up at all on Yelp or Doctor Score Card, there were no ratings for me on RateMDs, and Angie’s List required a paid subscription to see the ratings. The following image was taken from Healthgrades.com.

...It’s true that the rating looks stellar. However, this demonstrates some of the problems with the site.

This image shows my rating on various subjects. At first glance you might think, “Shapiro’s just stroking his ego.” It’s true that the rating looks stellar. However, this demonstrates some of the problems with the site.

Problem 1 - Old Data: First, this rating pertains to my prior practice in Madras, Oregon which will not accurately reflect my current university-based practice. Every practice and location is different, despite our attempts to standardize, leading to potential inaccuracy in the ratings.

Problem 2 - Small Sample Size: Second, and more importantly, this 5 star rating is based on only THREE individual ratings. Based off of an N of only three, one can only conclude that this 5 star rating is completely bogus. How likely is it that all of my patients would uniformly have the same 5 star experience and these 3 ratings pertain to my entire patient population?

Problem 3 - What is Being Rated? Third, who are the people that rated me? On one hand, the anonymous “raters” could have been lunatics, while on the other hand I could have personally placed those 3 reviews to skew the overall rating. Along this line of thought, typically patients will rate a doctor as good if s/he is personable, caring, and takes the time to answer their questions. There is little comment in my rating as to my technical competency or knowledge base, clearly important components to patient care which would affect my rating.

Problem 4 - Do We Trust the Data? Fourth, is it not possible that the content on these websites could be influenced by businesses, sponsors or other “interested” parties? It doesn’t take much to adjust the data.

Whenever I read a journal article or listen to a lecture, my first thought is always to question the source material for validity. Clearly Healthgrades.com fails the simplest of validity tests.

Bottom Line: Unfortunately, these online ratings are here to stay. Despite the fact that the ratings are not legitimate, the general public, not trained to analyze data in a systematic fashion, will likely use this information at increasing amounts and draw unfortunate conclusions about their physicians.

But don’t worry. If you want to find ratings about your primary care doctor or surgeon, you’ll be able to find them on sites like Angie’s list next to the painters, plumbers, and realtors.

Have you had experience with these rating sites? Do you think your patients are using them? Please join us in the PRESENT Podiatry eTalk discussion on this Topic and tell us of any interesting related experiences you may have had.