Of 34,748 online patient reviews, 66% of them awarded five stars, while only 34% gave one and two stars. While physicians may feel unfairly attacked online, statistically patients are almost twice as likely to give doctors good marks online as poor ones. Patients demand good clinical care, but also good customers along the lines of the hotel and restaurant industries. Prior research by Vanguard has found that disorganization, poor communication and other customer service complaints are the dominant ratings issues for doctors' offices and hospitals. The result is that each online review for a doctor carries as much as five times more impact toward a medical practice's overall rating. On average, a hotel receives 61 reviews and restaurants 27 reviews, but doctors average only 13. Rather, the polarizing effects of a disappointing patient experience are more dangerous to medical practices than other businesses. The good news for providers, though, is that doctors' online reviews do not rate generally better or worse than other businesses. The data suggests that while people's experiences with doctors are distinctly polarizing, their expectations of restaurants and hotels are more nuanced. While doctors, hotels and restaurants each average a 3.5 star rating out of five stars possible on the business review website, a doctor is 64% more likely to receive a five star review but 194% more likely to receive a one-star review. “Our reporting suggests that this reluctance to focus on individuals is one reason that patient harm has persisted in the face of considerable effort by the medical establishment,” Engelberg wrote.Patients are much more likely to both publicly praise and protest their experiences with doctors in online reviews than they are with restaurants and hotels, according to a Vanguard Communications analysis of 1.5 million online Yelp reviews. In the light of government inaction to the growing problem, ProPublica used Medicare data to create the database that assesses surgeon-specific - not merely hospital - data related to complications that arise from these common procedures. However, no such system has been established. In 1999, a report from the Institute of Medicine, titled “ To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System,” called for a national reporting system of serious adverse effects, including death, related to hospital procedures. Those surgeries were knee replacement, hip replacement, gallbladder removal, lumbar spinal fusion - both posterior and anterior technique - prostate resection, prostate removal, and cervical spinal fusion.ĭuring that time, 3,405 Medicare patients died during a hospital stay for those elective procedures.īut instead of taking the figures at face value, the ProPublica team evaluated cases of hospital readmission and surgeon mistakes to give potential patients an idea of who has high rates of complications. ProPublica released Surgeon Scorecard, a search engine that uses data from 63,173 Medicare patients who were readmitted to the hospital after eight elective procedures from 2009 to 2013. ‘Surgeon Scorecard’ Evaluates Performance Read More: Is da Vinci Robotic Surgery a Revolution or a Rip-off? » So we began with the view that the taxpayers who pay the costs of Medicare should be able to use its data to make the best possible decisions about their healthcare.” “The process of undergoing surgery includes some of the most consequential decisions any of us ever make. “These days, consumers can review ratings on everything from plumbers to hair salons to the latest digital cameras,” he wrote in an editorial published Tuesday. So, Engelberg, editor-in-chief of the nonprofit ProPublica, decided a year ago to use big data to peel back the curtain to give patients an accurate picture of who’s holding the scalpel during these procedures. Especially considering preventable hospital errors are now the third leading cause of death in the United States - resulting in 440,000 deaths annually. That didn’t make sense to Stephen Engelberg.

For years, if you wanted to order a pizza, you could consult numerous sources, such as Yelp or Google Reviews, to see who was the best.īut if you wanted rating information on doctors performing high-risk surgery, the same subjective scrutiny given to a Domino’s order was all that was available.

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