A Changing Landscape of Physician Quality Reporting: Analysis of Patients’ Online Ratings of Their Physicians Over a 5-Year Period

Abstract

BackgroundAmericans increasingly post and consult online physician rankings, yet we know little about this new phenomenon of public physician quality reporting. Physicians worry these rankings will become an outlet for disgruntled patients.ObjectiveTo describe trends in patients’ online ratings over time, across specialties, to identify what physician characteristics influence online ratings, and to examine how the value of ratings reflects physician quality.MethodsWe used data from RateMDs.com, which included over 386,000 national ratings from 2005 to 2010 and provided insight into the evolution of patients’ online ratings. We obtained physician demographic data from the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Area Resource File. Finally, we matched patients’ ratings with physician-level data from the Virginia Medical Board and examined the probability of being rated and resultant rating levels.ResultsWe estimate that 1 in 6 practicing US physicians received an online review by January 2010. Obstetrician/gynecologists were twice as likely to be rated (P < .001) as other physicians. Online reviews were generally quite positive (mean 3.93 on a scale of 1 to 5). Based on the Virginia physician population, long-time graduates were more likely to be rated, while physicians who graduated in recent years received higher average ratings (P < .001). Patients gave slightly higher ratings to board-certified physicians (P = .04), those who graduated from highly rated medical schools (P = .002), and those without malpractice claims (P = .1).ConclusionOnline physician rating is rapidly growing in popularity and becoming commonplace with no evidence that they are dominated by disgruntled patients. There exist statistically significant correlations between the value of ratings and physician experience, board certification, education, and malpractice claims, suggesting a positive correlation between online ratings and physician quality. However, the magnitude is small. The average number of ratings per physician is still low, and most rating variation reflects evaluations of punctuality and staff. Understanding whether they truly reflect better care and how they are used will be critically important.

Parental Awareness and Use of Online Physician Rating Sites

“…33 Although physicians may believe that negative ratings outnumber positive ones on physician-rating Web sites, 34 numerous studies have found that not to be the case. 20,[35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44] This finding is consistent with what is known about consumer-sourced rating systems in general. In our study, parents reported posting positive ratings for physicians more often than negative ratings, by a factor of 3 to 1.…”

“…38 This concern is prevalent for traditional (ie, not online) satisfaction surveys as well. 56 In fact, the bias may be most prominent among physicians who have the least number of satisfied patients.…”

“…20 However, the number of physicians with ratings, as well as the number of ratings per physician, is increasing. 38 In addition, it is not clear that this bias and lack of representativeness matters much to parents who may already be familiar with similar issues in ratings of consumer goods such as books and movies. Simply having some information readily available to help inform a decision about a physician may still be perceived as useful.…”

Automatic Classification of Online Doctor Reviews: Evaluation of Text Classifier Algorithms (Preprint)

“…Recently, there is an increasing number of sites where users rate doctors. Several works have analyzed the content and scores of such reviews, mostly by manually examining a subset of them [4,5,6,7]. However, not much work has studied how to automatically classify doctor reviews.…”

Understanding a Nonlinear Causal Relationship Between Rewards and Physicians� Contributions in Online Health Care Communities: Longitudinal Study (Preprint)

“…This phenomenon has received the attention of many researchers, and several studies of the OHC have been conducted focusing on various issues, such as how online physician reviews have been used in different countries [2][3][4][5][6][7]; what are the differences between the traditional and online physician reviews [8]; and whether differences in medical specialty areas affect these reviews [5,9]. Nevertheless, in China, even though the OHC might help consumers look for a good physician, the queues at Chinese hospitals are legendary [10], which means that it is not easy to make an appointment with a physician.…”