School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota Paper: Physician-Rating Websites are Biased in Picking Doctors, Exaggerating Consumer Opinions, Says Paper to be Presented at INFORMS Healthcare Conference June 2011
For several years, Medical Justice has made the case that most doctor rating sites have several fundamental flaws; many lack statistically a significant sample size of patient ratings which impacts the quality of information available to consumers. Doctors see between 1,000 to 3,000 patients a year, depending on specialty. Yet, most doctors only have a handful of online ratings. A paper, “The Information Value of Online Physician Ratings”, being presented at a healthcare conference sponsored by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) supports this point.
“The Information Value of Online Physician Ratings” is co-authored by Ritu Agarwal, professor of information systems and director of the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems, Guodong “Gordon” Gao, assistant professor, and PhD candidate Brad Greenwood, of the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, along with Jeffrey McCullough of the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota.
The authors investigated potential biases among Internet users rating general practitioners on websites. In particular, the study looked at which doctors patients chose to rate, how they rated those doctors and the intensity of the patients’ opinions.
Agarwal states, that physicians are concerned whether “these ratings a true measure of clinical quality.” Or are they just the rantings of a disgruntled minority.
