Distraught over the results of cosmetic surgery on her nose, Katherine Chen did what many people do when they're unhappy with a doctor. She consulted a malpractice lawyer and filed a complaint with the Medical Board of California.
But the 22-year-old college student didn't stop there. Chen logged onto her home computer and wrote a tearful review about her experience, posting it to a website that encourages consumers to rate their healthcare providers. "I wasn't nasty about it," the West Covina resident says. "But I posted a comment about what I went through. These websites are useful. Doctors still have a lot of power."
Chen and thousands of other consumers are trying to rein in that power. They're saying what they think about the current state of healthcare and, more specifically, the doctors who provide it. Dozens of websites that permit people to rate, review, spin or flame their doctors have sprung up in the last year, operating in much the same way as online services that help people find the best hotels or avoid plumbers who overcharge.
Patients and site operators say the trend is good for consumers and good for healthcare. Thoughtful doctors, they say, will provide better customer service because of the feedback, and the bad ones will no longer be able to hide. And, they add, why should doctors be immune from the trend toward better customer service?
Physicians aren't so sure of such reasoning. Many say the reviews on RateMDs.com, Vitals.com, DrScore.com and other sites are skewed by disgruntled patients and are thus unfair, pushing some doctors to near-ruin after a single post.
"These sites don't yield enough power yet to get bad doctors to change. And in the meantime, they may hurt good doctors," says Dr. Phyllis Hollenbeck, a Washington, D.C., family physician and author of "Sacred Trust: The Ten Rules of Life, Death and Medicine," a new book promoting patient empowerment. "It only takes one or two scathing comments and a doctor is put in a terrible position."
The sites, more than two dozen of them, vary in how they operate, their scope of information provided and their efforts to be fair. But the trend is toward free, anonymous, no-holds-barred forums. Some sites have grown out of existing ratings services. Five years after he started the hugely popular RateMyProfessors.com, John Swapceinski and his business partner turned to medicine, launching RateMDs in 2004.
