My mate, Dr Rob Russo, was asking me about negative comments on doctors made by patients on the web. He was wondering how these could be monitored.
I didn’t know how this could be done and my response was that I personally wouldn’t bother as there was nothing positive to be gained by finding out.
We then talked about doctor rating sites. I did not think these were really in use in Australia but I resolved to find out more.
I found RateMDs and then searched rheumatologists in my city:
There’s only a small handful of my rheumatology colleagues on here and I was glad to see that the only review I had was positive.
(By the way, I didn’t write that review!)
A specific Australian Dr rating site is: http://www.doctoralia.com.au/healthpros/speciality/rheumatologists-1719
I can’t imagine rheumatologist reviews are that useful at the moment.
For one, there are so few of my colleagues that appear on these sites. And even when they appear, there are so few reviews.
I had thought that it would only be aggrieved patients who used these sites to vent but from this small sample, this does not appear to be the case.
One major issue is that the reviews are anonymous (which I can understand being done to protect a reviewer from exposing detail of their medical history). But, this does mean that these sites have less credibility than a site like TripAdvisor.
So, I’m interested to hear if any of you have actually used a Dr rating website? Does it provide useful information? Should we take them seriously?