Unlike Yelp, Healthgrades, which says it has 6 million survey scores, has not allowed consumers to post comments. Healthgrades, a site which focuses solely on health providers, also sees slightly lower ratings for doctors than for dentists and other health providers, though the differences are smaller than those on Yelp. In general, expectations are clear, and ways to gauge success are easier than with a doctor visit. A typical dental visit is for a specific service - a teeth cleaning, a cavity filled or a root canal. He has written extensively about physician review websites and physician arguments against them, but did not review the Yelp data.ĭoctor visits also tend to be more complex than visits to the dentist or chiropractor. Other providers, like dentists and physical therapists, are "actively seeking out customers to review them, whereas doctors have a lot of antipathy toward reviews and as a result have been trying to suppress reviews for many years," said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and co-director of its High Tech Law Institute. Acupuncturists, chiropractors and massage therapists did far better, with average ratings of 4.5 to 4.6. Health providers as a whole earned an average of 4 stars.īut sort by profession and the greater dissatisfaction with doctors stands out.ĭoctors earned a lower proportion of 5-star reviews than other health professionals, pushing their average review to the lowest of any large health profession, at 3.6. Instead of calling out a doctor over botched care or a possible misdiagnosis (these certainly do happen), patients are far more likely to object to long wait times, the difficulty of securing an appointment, billing errors, a doctor's chilly bedside manner or the unprofessionalism of the office staff. In many ways, consumers on Yelp rate health providers in the same way they do restaurants: on how they feel they've been treated. They get millions of page views every month on Yelp's site alone. Though Yelp's health reviews date back to 2004, more than half of them were written in the past two years. Some have gone so far as to threaten - or even sue - consumers who posted negative feedback.īut such reviews have only grown in popularity as consumers increasingly challenge the notion that doctor knows best about everything. "While one negative customer experience is one too many, we don't believe the numbers presented are representative of the service that a vast majority of our customers receive every day," he said.įor years, doctors have lamented the proliferation of online rating websites, saying patients simply aren't equipped to review their quality and expertise. Western Dental did not return phone calls and emails seeking comment.ĭennis Moynihan, a spokesman for Madison, N.J.-based Quest Diagnostics, said the company has more than 2,200 patient service centers around the country and had 51 million customer encounters last year. Of the top 10 most-reviewed health providers, only Elements Massage, a national chain, and LaserAway, a tattoo and laser hair removal company with locations in California and Arizona, had an average rating of at least 4 stars. To search and sort, we used RevEx, a tool built for us by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering. In addition to reading about consumers' experiences with hospitals, nursing homes and doctors, Yelp users will see objective data about how the providers' practice patterns compare to their peers.Īs part of the relationship, ProPublica gets an unprecedented peek inside Yelp's trove of 1.3 million health reviews. ProPublica and Yelp recently agreed to a partnership that will allow information from ProPublica's interactive health databases to begin appearing on Yelp's health provider pages. But both rude & incompetent is unacceptable," wrote one Yelp reviewer of a New York internist. I will settle for rude & competent or polite & incompetent. Indeed, doctors and health professionals everywhere could learn a valuable lesson from the archives of Yelp: Your officious personality or brusque office staff can sink your reputation even if your professional skills are just fine.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |