Medical Doctors Ratings

Study Points to Biases in Online Physician Ratings

Physicians have long argued that doctor rating websites provide biased information that does not accurately reflect the quality of care patients receive.

In a statement, the American Medical Association said, "Patient satisfaction is important to physicians, and patients should have access to credible information so they can be confident in their choice of physician, but public web forums have many shortcomings." It added, "Some allow postings to be published anonymously, and there is no guarantee that the opinions about a physician even come from that physician's patient. People may express dissatisfaction on these forums because they wanted a medication that wasn't medically necessary, or because they didn't receive a prescription or service that was delayed or denied by their insurance company."

Physicians might be partially right about biases in online ratings, but not in the way many of those doctors assumed.

A new study by researchers at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business and the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health examined the informativeness of online ratings about primary care physicians. Researchers found that low-quality physicians actually are less likely to be reviewed online. In fact, the majority of online physician ratings are very positive.

Guodong "Gordon" Gao -- an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and one of the study's authors -- noted that out of about 300,000 physicians ratings studied, half were given the highest score possible -- a five out of five.

So are physicians' concerns about patients relying on online ratings to make health care decisions -- much the same way they turn to such sites to make decisions about where to eat or book a hotel -- off base? Maybe, but maybe not.

Study Details

For the study -- titled, "The Information Value of Online Physician Ratings" -- researchers relied on several data sets, including:

The study focused on general practitioners, or family care physicians. The final data set included 1,513 physicians who had been evaluated through offline surveys and 696 doctors who had been rated online. Researchers then compared physician scores on the offline survey with the online physician ratings.

Physician-Rating Websites are Biased in Picking ... - Medical Justice

For several years, Medical Justice has made the case that most doctor rating sites have several fundamental flaws; many lack statistically a significant sample size of patient ratings which impacts the quality of information available to consumers. Doctors see between 1,000 to 3,000 patients a year, depending on specialty. Yet, most doctors only have a handful of online ratings. A paper, “The Information Value of Online Physician Ratings” , being presented at a healthcare conference sponsored by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) supports this point.

“The Information Value of Online Physician Ratings” is co-authored by Ritu Agarwal, professor of information systems and director of the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems, Guodong “Gordon” Gao, assistant professor, and PhD candidate Brad Greenwood, of the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, along with Jeffrey McCullough of the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota.

The authors investigated potential biases among Internet users rating

In a podcast on The Science of Better , Agarwal explains “patients may not always agree with their (doctor’s) recommendation. If you don’t agree and are disgruntled, you may go online and complain about a procedure that was perfectly valid given the medical condition that you had.”

Agarwal also addresses the validity of online ratings. “If people who are happy don’t bother to go online and provide a rating, then you are going to get a skewed distribution of ratings online and the impression that you would walk away with is the doctor is not a very good doctor.”

The study’s findings support these concerns about bias in the current online rating environment. Among the authors’ conclusions;

Agarwal states “Patients need high quality information about the most consequential service that they consume: healthcare.”

We agree.

That is why Medical Justice is working with select partners to help create a system that will balance the legitimate needs of patients with the reasonable concerns of doctors; a system that will provide much needed “quality information.” Medical Justice/Dental Justice is leading the charge to promote ratings systems that include a critical mass number of credible reviews to provide the most accurate picture possible of a doctor’s practice.

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