Increasingly, healthcare is pushed to revolve around the patient. Patients are encouraged to be more involved in their care, reimbursement is partially being tied to patient satisfaction scores and individuals are proactively "shopping around" for their healthcare. However, at what point do healthcare decisions fall out of the realm of consumer choice?
As part of the push for patient engagement, hospitals and even the government are publishing quality scores and metrics intended to provide transparency for individuals. But now, even consumer-driven review sites such as Yelp are hosting reviews for physicians — a move which Niam Yaraghi, PhD, a fellow in the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation, believes steps over the patient boundary.
In an opinion piece for U.S. News, Dr. Yaraghi wrote consumer-driven sites like Yelp function as quality standards for industries such as hotels, restaurants and entertainment.
"Customers are generally qualified and capable of evaluating service and products," Dr. Yaraghi wrote. "At a restaurant, anybody can tell if the steak is too chewy, the atmosphere is not pleasant, or the waitress is rude…Online reviews are valid measures of a restaurant's quality."
However, this does not carry over to the healthcare sector, he said.
"Patients are neither qualified nor capable of evaluating the quality of the medical services that they receive. How can a patient, with no medical expertise, know that the treatment option that he received was the best available one? How can a patient's family who lost him on a hospital bed, know that physicians had provided their loved one with the best possible medical care?" Dr. Yaraghi wrote.
Patients and their families rely on physicians' knowledge and expertise to provide the best care they can, so they are ill-equipped to judge the value of physicians' medical decisions.
When individuals rank physicians and providers on consumer-driven review sites, what they are actually ranking is service — or as it is called in the healthcare industry, bedside manner, according to Dr. Yaraghi. "A physician's online rating is not a valid measure of his or her medical expertise," he wrote.
That being said, individuals who are invested in their healthcare and researching physicians should do so, but just choose their sources wisely.
"While the interaction between patients and their medical providers is an important element of the medical care process, it is not the most important one," Dr. Yaraghi concluded. "To choose the best medical provider, patients are encouraged to rely on measures of medical expertise and avoid invalid online reviews."
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