Patients rate doctors online

Katherine Chen is a plastic surgery patient who posted a review about her experience on a website that encourages consumers to rate health-care providers. She did this when she got dissatisfied with her nasal reshaping surgery and even hired a malpractice lawyer and filed a complaint with the Medical Board of California.

Chen, 22, said that she wasn’t really nasty about her review. “I wasn’t nasty about it. But I posted a comment about what I went through. These web sites are useful. Doctors still have a lot of power.”

Chen, together with other consumers, was just expressing what she thinks about the current state of health care and the doctors who provide it. The presence of dozens of websites that allow people to rate and review their doctors have made this activity a lot easier. These websites operate in the same way online services help people find hotels or plumbers.

Though it is obvious that such trend is generally good for consumers considering that doctors will provide better services because of the feedback mechanism provided by these sites, some doctors feel threatened that those review sites might be skewed by disgruntled patients whose sole intention is to ruin doctors with just one post.

Dr. Phyllis Hollenbeck, a family physician and author, said that these review sites might pose potential danger to good doctors. “These sites don’t yield enough power yet to get bad doctors to change. And in the meantime, they may hurt good doctors,” he said. “It only takes one or two scathing comments and a doctor is put in a terrible position.”

Chen said that she did her own research when she chose her surgeon but she was horrified with her rhinoplasty results. She filed a complaint with the Medical Board of California and consulted a lawyer who discouraged her from filing a lawsuit because of the cost. Eventually, Chen felt that exposing the doctor on the Internet was her only recourse.

Later, Chen underwent revision surgery and was quite pleased with the outcome. She also used a ratings web site to write favorably about the doctor who performed it.