In the era of social media, doctor-rating sites are growing. Photo: Adam Berry/Getty Images The proliferation of “rate my doctor” websites has prompted Canada’s large medical malpractice insurer to offer advice to physicians on how to manage their cyber reputations.
Among their recommendations: Take the feedback as “objectively as possible.” Don’t ask patients to post positive reviews or sign agreements they won’t write negative ones. Never respond online even if they are certain which patient made the posting.
“Rather than turn a blind eye to these ratings, doctors should consider monitoring what is being said about them, and take measured steps to deal with these reviews,” the Ottawa-based Canadian Medical Protective Association says.
In the era of social media, doctor-rating sites are growing. The sites allow patients to post anonymous comments about their doctors and rave — or rant — about everything from how long they’re kept waiting for appointments to their medical care. But they’ve also drawn ire from doctors’ groups who say physicians are hamstrung by confidentiality issues and can’t respond to negative online reviews without risking breaching patient privacy rules.
The Canadian Medical Protective Association (CMPA) is advising doctors they generally won’t “extend assistance” to physicians wishing to bring a civil action against a website or a patient over negative reviews. However, the malpractice insurer has prepared a form letter physicians can send to sites demanding they take down comments they consider defamatory.
“Physicians tend to get very upset with (online) criticism,” said Dr. Douglas Bell, associate executive director of the CMPA. “People who go into medicine generally go into it with an altruistic purpose. So when they see criticism they tend not to be objective and look at it (instead) more sort of as an attack on their professionalism,” he said.
But online reviews can also act as a realty check for a doctor “to see if there is something going on that you might not be aware of, or that you might be aware of but it’s more problematic than you thought,” Bell said.
A U.S. study published this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that a quarter of 3,500 people surveyed reported using online doctor rating sites.
Of those, 35 per cent said they chose a doctor based on good ratings and 37 per cent had avoided a doctor with bad reviews.
“There are many more people using these sites than we originally thought,” said lead author Dr. David Hanauer, of the University of Michigan Medical School.
RateMDs.com, the largest physician-rating site in Canada, has grown from only tens of thousands of unique visitors per year when it first launched in the U.S. in 2004, to more than 30 million unique visits per year today.
The site has ratings for more than two million doctors from across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
Despite what doctors fear, studies suggest online doctor reviews are largely positive: In one study published in 2010, researchers who studied 33 physician-rating websites for reviews of a random sample of 300 Boston doctors found most ratings — 88 per cent — were positive, six per cent were negative and six per cent were neutral.
They also found several “narrative” and glowing reviews that appeared to be written by the doctors themselves.
“Rate your doctor” sites offer a novel way for patients “to provide information about physician performance,” the authors wrote in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
But others caution there’s no way of knowing for certain which comments are fake and that people are far more likely to complain about bad experiences than good ones.
“A lot of (doctors) don’t feel they are a true measure of their work,” Hanauer, of the University of Michigan, said.
When RateMDs expanded into Canada, “we got a lot of very upset doctors calling the CMPA suggesting that they were being defamed,” said Bell.
But defamation is in the eyes of the beholder, he said.
Some of the most egregious comments — “this doctor is incompetent, I wouldn’t take my dog to him” — could clearly be considered defamatory “because, actually, an authority licenses them, so it’s unlikely they’re incompetent,” Bell said.
But similar comments from multiple patients are likely a sign that a problem is serious and needs addressing, he said.
“What we’re really saying (to doctors) is, why don’t you check them out? See what people are saying,” Bell said. “It may lead to an opportunity for improvement.”
skirkey(at)postmedia.com
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