

February 23, 2017
Consumers increasingly turn to commercial physician-rating websites, similar to those for restaurants and hotels, when searching for a new doctor, but the sites rarely have information that actually helps patients, researchers say.
Most doctors typically have no more than a few reviews on a site, and the reviews often don’t provide good insight into the doctor’s qualifications, personality or the patient experience, a new study finds. Across the 28 websites, more than 8,000 reviews had 1,784 narrative comments for the 600 doctors. About a third of the doctors didn’t have a review on any website, and those who had at least one review were likely to have only three or four. In some cases, the narratives were repeats written on more than one site.
About 60% of consumers looking for information about doctors online say reviews are important, according to a 2014 study published in JAMA. “Consumers should still be careful about what they view on these sites,” said IHPI member David Hanauer, lead author of the 2014 paper.
“It’s hard to know what is real, and it’s hard to make a fair assessment with so few ratings,” Hanauer, who wasn’t involved with the current study, told Reuters Health by email. “If consumers use these sites, they should visit multiple sites to get a more complete picture before making any decisions.”