What a 5-Star Online Evaluation Means

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Bloomberg news: Don’t Yelp Your Doctor. Study Finds Ratings Are All Wrong.

Here’s an excerpt:

If you’re looking for the best doctor, online ratings are unlikely to be much help.

That’s the determination of researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who compared reviews of 78 of the medical center’s specialists on five popular ratings sites with a set of internal quality measures and found there was essentially no correlation…

Brennan Spiegel, a gastroenterologist and co-author of the study, said that may be the right way to think about reviews — as gauges of things the patient can observe.

“It may be that these ratings are a good measure of the front-office service or the interpersonal style of the physician,” said Spiegel, a professor and director of health services research at Cedars-Sinai. “We’re not saying that there’s no value to these online ratings — we’re saying don’t confuse those ratings in any way, shape or form with the actual technical skill.”

The study, published online on Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, compared measures developed by Cedars-Sinai with users’ ratings on five sites: Healthgrades, Yelp, Vitals, RateMDs and UCompareHealthCare. The internal performance metrics include reviews from doctors’ colleagues and administrators, how often patients are readmitted and how long they remain in the hospital, and adherence to practice guidelines.

My take: I’ve been told that the key to patient care are the 3 A’s: availability, affability, and ability.  Online evaluations likely can help assess the first two A’s; in addition, these sites allow for constructive criticisms but they need to evolve to include other measures of physician performance.  Nevertheless, ignoring online evaluations (eg. digital reputation)  would be a mistake for physicians –they are here to stay.

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