Booming Doctor Rating Websites

Internet sites where consumers publish recommendations and exchange views are booming. First came websites rating university professors, digital cameras, hotels and nightclubs, now review sites for physicians and hospitals are popping up all over. The rating portals are heavily used by consumers hungry for information, but medical professionals are not enthused.

By Marc Baumann

When John Swapceinski tore a ligament in his knee while jogging in a park in San Francisco in March 2004, he knew he needed a reliable specialist. At a loss for help, he leafed through the local phone book and finally called the doctor at the top of the list. The specialist advised immediate surgery and also offered to do the job. Swapceinski, suffering excruciating pain, agreed.

This turned out to be a huge mistake: the procedure was painful, the attending physician turned out to be surly and the hospital less than pristine. Upset by the experience and the lack of information about available physicians, the trained web engineer decided to launch a website where patients could rate their doctors and recommend them to others.

Now, three years later, John’s website RateMDs.com is a leading web portal for physician references. What started with a handful of tips has mushroomed into a database containing over 350,000 comments and covering criteria such as helpfulness, punctuality and know-how. 500 new ratings are added every day. Just short of half a million people visited RateMDs.com every month this year. Swapceinski is convinced that this is only the beginning. “The market potential is enormous”, he said.

Swapceinski’s website is not unique. Consumer recommendations and forums to share information on the Internet are booming. First came websites rating teachers, video cameras, restaurants, digital cameras and nightclubs, now portals about doctors and hospitals are popping up everywhere. In the United States alone there are currently at least two dozen websites, including RateMDs.com, Healthgrades.com and DrScore.com, BookOfDoctors.com and HospitalCompare.org, where patients can talk about their experiences with physicians and hospitals and post recommendations. Not only do they offer specific search options for doctors based on criteria such as medical specialty, region, background and gender, they also contain extensive ratings and comments about patient experiences in all areas of medicine.

Most of these sites are financed through Internet advertising and information is free of charge. Healthgrades.com charges $ 20 for a report about one of the 5000 listed hospitals, while an in-depth review of one of the 650,000 available doctors goes for 30 dollars.Without a doubt, the trend in the search for medical information is heading in the direction of cyberspace.

According to a recently published study of Pew Internet & American Life Project, 80 percent of Americans with Internet access consult the World Wide Web about issues of general health, and one third goes online to research doctors and hospitals. Five years ago, only one in five people used the web for this purpose.

However, the popularity of medical rating portals is growing outside the U.S. borders as well. As a result of its rapid success, Swapceinski’s website RateMDs.com has already expanded into other English-speaking markets such as Canada, Australia and Great Britain. The U.S. portal DrScorecard.com has recently introduced a comprehensive list of physician reviews from India and Canada. And even in Germany this kind of rating website, for example Checkthedoc.de, Helpster.de and Patienten-empfehlen-aerzte.de is spreading like wildfire.

At the same time, the boom in rating forums has many a medical professional up in arms. Not surprisingly, many physicians find it difficult to accept a consumer empowerment movement, which is unfavorable at times and gathering momentum through the web, after decades of going about their business without being questioned. Suddenly, they see their practices mercilessly scrutinized and face a daunting force of opinions. For another, they are infuriated that the terms of use of many rating sites allow doctors to be exposed on the web along with all sorts of personal information, while the authors of the criticism remain anonymous.

For example, “extremely unfriendly, unacceptable waiting times, absolutely incompetent” is the scathing verdict about a Seattle-based general practitioner on the Internet site RateMDs.com. He is not the only one to find less than flattering observations about his services: “Fails to address problems appropriately, just tries to get rid of you, rarely refers patients to specialists” one reviewer said about a family doctor in Texas. But there is praise as well: “competent, very pleasant, sensitive” is how a physician in San Francisco was judged, “fully deserving of my trust”.

Dermatologist Daniel Taheri from Los Angeles, who was called a “money-grubbing scoundrel” on one of the sites, finds it outrageous that medical services are not only anonymously rated on the web, doctors can also be criticized in the form of unfiltered comments: “These websites represent an enormous problem for physicians. Our reputation, which we have built over many years at great pains, can be destroyed with a single negative patient opinion posted on the Internet.” Furthermore, he believes these sites are a veritable invitation for abuse and character assassination.

John Swapceinski of RateMDs.com emphasized that every patient entry is examined for credibility to prevent medical professionals from misusing the site for self-marketing, to seek revenge against a colleague or patients insulting their doctor. Unsubstantiated allegations of malpractice are also filtered. He noted that a key element of the Internet is that users can freely express their opinions under the cloak of anonymity.

The 39-year old rating site operator is one of many who have received dozens of letters from doctors threatening to sue. However an actual lawsuit has never been filed against him. “So far, the law is still on our side”, said the Californian businessman and added that 75 percent of all ratings on his website were positive after all.

Swapceinski now makes his living with consumer opinion portals. He has launched over a dozen rating sites, including the popular RateMyProfessors.com. He sold the site to the American Viacom media group last January. As CEO of RatingZ, he currently controls 13 review websites; among others sites about veterinarians, drugs and lawyers. A further expansion is in the planning stages.

Published January 2008 in AOspine magazine, the publication of AOspine International, a wordwide community for surgeons, researchers and allied spine professionals.

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