Doctors & patients are saying about 'A-Fib.com'...
"A-Fib.com is a great web site for patients, that is unequaled by anything else out there."
Dr. Douglas L. Packer, MD, FHRS, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN
"Jill and I put you and your work in our prayers every night. What you do to help people through this [A-Fib] process is really incredible."
Jill and Steve Douglas, East Troy, WI
“I really appreciate all the information on your website as it allows me to be a better informed patient and to know what questions to ask my EP.
Faye Spencer, Boise, ID, April 2017
“I think your site has helped a lot of patients.”Dr. Hugh G. Calkins, MD Johns Hopkins,
Baltimore, MD
Looking for the Best Doctor, Online Ratings are Unlikely to be Much Help
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, nearly 60 percent of patients say they like to use online reviews when searching for a physician.
As healthcare consumers, you need to know about the limitations of each of these kinds of sites.
“Consumers should be careful about giving them too much credence, whether they are comments or starred assessments”, says Dr. Mark W. Friedberg, director of the Boston office of the RAND Corporation and one of the co-authors of a study that analyzed ProPublica’s surgeon website. ProPublica is one of a wide range of doctor rating sites available to consumers online.
Some websites, like ProPublica, post objective medical performance measures. Other websites like Healthgrades, Vitals, and Yelp post star ratings and comments written by patients.
Keep in mind that there’s no way of knowing who’s posting many online doctor reviews or what motivated the reviewer to write about the physician.
Dr. Friedberg warns, “You never know who’s writing these. It could be the doctor, or his friends and family members. It could be a patient who had an unusually good or bad experience…it could be Russian bots. It’s the Wild West. Buyer beware.”
Research Results: Online Physician Ratings Unlikely to be Much Help
Looking for the best doctor, online ratings are unlikely to be much help according to researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. They compared reviews of 78 of the medical center’s specialists on five popular ratings sites with a set of internal quality measures and found there was essentially no correlation.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, compared measures developed by Cedars-Sinai with users’ ratings on five sites: Healthgrades, Yelp, Vitals, RateMDs and UCompareHealthCare. Cedars-Sinai’s internal performance metrics include reviews from doctors’ colleagues and administrators, how often patients are readmitted, how long they remain in the hospital, and adherence to practice guidelines.
According to the study, there was little correlation between the doctors’ performance scores and how their patients assessed them on the websites.
‘Pay-to-Play’ Doctor Listings Common
Furthermore, paying to be listed in a doctor referral service is common among online directories. In addition, doctors can pay extra to be listed first in your database search results.
Doctors can pay to be in your search results
The article ‘ABC News Investigates Top Doctor Awards: Are They Always Well Deserved?’ includes a warning:
“Don’t be confused by sound-alike websites like ‘TopDocs.com’. ‘TopDocs.com’ does not claim to rank doctors in any way. In fact, regardless of true top doctor status, a spot at TopDocs.com is available to any physician who pays for membership. The cost to buy a spot on the TopDocs.com website ranges anywhere from $1,500 to $10,000, in addition to an annual fee of $1,600.”
Don’t fall prey to hype, advertising, or third parties that have something to gain by recommending a particular healthcare provider.
Are Consumer Ratings of Doctors Any Better?
Some people believe that patient ratings are the best source of information on doctors. Unfortunately, that is a misguided assumption. Patients may be able to rate a doctor’s “bedside manner,” but they know little about the complexity of medical care.
In fact, an article in Forbes magazine stated:
“The current system might just kill you. Many doctors, in order to get high ratings (and a higher salary), over-prescribe and over-test, just to “satisfy” patients who probably aren‘t qualified to judge their care. And there’s a financial cost, as flawed patient survey methods and the decisions they induce, produce billions more in waste.”
What Patients Need to Know
Some web sites for A-Fib patients may be biased, often for financial gain. When searching online for any health-related information, always ask yourself:
“Who is paying for this website, and what is their agenda?”
When searching for any doctor, especially a cardiologist or electrophysiologist, do not rely entirely on doctor ratings or doctor referral sites in isolation.
Instead, get personal referrals. If you know nurses or staff who work in the cardiology field, they can be great resources. Ask for referrals from other A-Fib patients.
Refer to our A-Fib.com Directory of Doctors and Medical Centers who treat A-Fib patients. Then do your own research on each doctor. For guidance, see our page: Finding the Right Doctor for You.
At A-Fib.com, we accept no fee, benefit or value of any kind to be listed in our Directory of Doctors and Medical Centers. A-Fib.com is not affiliated with any practice, medical center or physician.
A word to the wise…
