A new study suggests you should be wary of relying on websites that offer patient reviews of doctors.
The study, published in JAMA, examined 28 commercial sites which allow former patients to leave reviews of medical professionals based on their experiences. It also was based on a randomly-selected group of 600 doctors from around the country.
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Among the sites' shortcomings: Most do not allow you to customize your search for a physician based on a number of factors that are important in picking a doctor, particularly for those of limited means.
For instance, less than a third of the sites allow users to search for doctors based on insurance network. Only four let you search for doctors of a certain gender, and only three help you find doctors who speak certain languages.
Just as bad, the sites do not appear to offer a comprehensive look at an area's doctors. Roughly a third of the 600 physicians had not been rated on any of the 28 websites.
Many other doctors elicited a few reviews on some of the sites, but even among those who had been rated at least once, the median number of reviews was seven.
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The more profound issue with the rating sites, of course, is the extent to which they can be trusted as a source of legitimate patient feedback.
First, it is impossible to verify whether the person posting the testimonial has actually visited the doctor or that his/her account of the interaction is accurate. Inaccurate posts could be negative comments from potential competitors, and inaccurate rave reviews could of course be posted by the doctors themselves.
Inaccurate comments aren't the only issue, of course. The one or two comments might be entirely accurate but also completely unrepresentative of what the average patient thinks about the doctor.
Bruce Y. Lee, a professor of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, writes in Forbes that picking a doctor based on a handful of online reviews is "a bit like taking career advice from the YouTube comments."
So how should people pick doctors?
In a separate article, Lee cautions against a variety of sources, including rating websites, advertisements, celebrity endorsements and even testimonials from your friends and family. One of the best ways to assess a doctor, he suggests, is by talking to medical trainees who have worked under the physician.
In conclusion, he argues, choosing a doctor should not resemble choosing a restaurant. It is "much more important than choosing the right wedding planner, fashion designer, caterer, hair stylist, or even financial planner. It could literally mean the difference between life and death. So why not give the choice the care that it deserves?"
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