The Editor’s Note: The Ratings Game
By Bob Keaveney “Dr. Joe Smith at XYZ Memorial Hospital nearly killed my wife then lied to cover it up.”
“If you see this doctor, please get a second opinion!”
“I was also told by [a] friend that Dr. Murphy prescribed an adult medicine to an 8-year-old girl, and she nearly died.”
So read some of the posts on Doctorscorecard.com, one of many popular Web sites that allow users to post comments and issue “ratings” of physicians for anyone to see. The Web sites are intended to serve people looking for a physician, but they also function as a forum for nasty, often personal, attacks against physicians named publicly by anonymous accusers. It took me about 10 minutes to find these examples, and there are plenty more. One poster accuses a physician of having “a mental problem,” while still another said her doctor’s own nurse “confided that she often goes home in tears.”
Is any of this stuff true? Who knows? It’s impossible to determine what really happened in these encounters, or even whether there was an encounter. (That’s why I’ve changed the physicians’ names here.)
But most people are smart enough, one hopes, to look askance at ad hominem attacks by nameless Web posters. As unfair as these types of sites are, I think their flaws are so obvious and their credibility so suspect that they are the least worrisome manifestation of the increasing efforts to “grade” physicians online. Continued...
