Online Doctor Review Sites

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Chimed

Chimed

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So I googled my name a few months ago and found that one of these doctor review sites had a review of me. It was not a very flattering review and the person gave me all 1's out of 4...However, for reasons I won't get into, I have reason to believe it was not a patient who wrote this, but rather someone who I had a falling out with. The wording of the review was not consistent with how I practice or what I do during my evaluations or return visits. Also, the timing of the review is suspect. It also was the perspective of an adult patient and I haven't seen adults in several years. I really don't mean this to sound narcissistic and I'm not saying I'm perfect, but I really do get extremely good feedback through my clinic from patients, families, and attendings. I've also never had a patient "fire" me. I can only think of situations in the emergency room where a patient would not have liked being admitted against their will that would have caused a grudge against me.

As I'm sure we all do, I put a lot of effort into my clinic developmental and care very much about patient care. So, having one bad review (from likely not even a patient of mine!) become a permanent record on a web site that has no verification that this was even a patient is extremely upsetting to me. 😡 This means that anytime someone does a search on me, this review will come up for many years. I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised, given that we work in a field that is hard not to upset some of our patients--borderlines, addicts not getting benzos, etc.

I'm curious if anyone has had this happened to them. Also, I could really use some advice on how to deal with this. Is there a way to delete this or control what is found on google? I thought about contacting the site to tell them this may not even be a patient, but stopped out of concerned that if they contacted that person, it could just make things worse. Also, contacting the person I think may have written this would also not be a good idea and I'm afraid it might just provoke more problems.

Any thoughts or advice?
 
The only way to erase content from populating hits on search engines such as Google is to file a complaint with the webmaster of the specific site in question. It is entirely up to the webmaster to edit or delete content. Some webmasters are completely absent and if they do not receive the complaint, any content will be forever locked in cyberspace until the domain and hosting account shutdown due to lack of payment or failure to renew.

Good news about bad reviews is that patients, regardless if they are paying with insurance or cash, rarely utilize search engines to find their doctors. They will find out about you by going through their insurance company, getting a referral, or hearing about you by word of mouth. However, once they get your name, there is a small chance they will Google it for reviews.

As disappointing as it is to receive a bad review, in this day and age it's almost impossible to avoid. My guess is that many if not most physicians will have been reviewed online at some point during their career.

There are several inherent problems with internet physician reviews. First of all, only a very small % of patients will take the time to register a username and login at a physician rating site. My guess is the patients who do are those having very strong emotional responses. Either you were very good or very bad (two strong emotional responses that would motivate someone to go out of their way to write something about you online). Negative emotion seems to be the more motivating of the two. These ratings simply provide a distorted view of your clinical performance and a playground for Axis II patients or fallen out significant others.

Physician rating websites are worthless scum doing nothing more than generating minimal advertising profits that know that they suck because even if they created the Yelp of physician ratings it wouldn't make any money. Frankly I think online physician reviews are complete bull**** that set us up for internet defamation.

Sorry to hear you're having this problem. Contact the webmaster though.
 
So I can't speak from a physicians perspective yet, but F0nzie was right that patients will typically go through word of mouth a lot of the time.

As a patient, the two times I've gone to review sites were when I didn't have anyone to give me suggestions on who to see. I did actually find my new primary care provider sort of that way, the clinic was suggested and then I picked the doctor. She had 9 reviews with well-thought out comments, 5 stars for the average.

I might be biased because of my hopeful career track, but when I see all 1s and someone sounds completely irate, I take it with a grain of salt. If the person sounds unreasonable or a bit off kilter then I disregard it. I generally disregard stars only with no comments. If it looks like there's a certain pattern of behavior, then it makes me wary, unless it looks like the same person trying to write multiple reviews.

If shoot the site administrator a note about how you haven't seen adults during the time in question, you might be able to get it changed. Otherwise, maybe ask if you can put a note in yourself regarding the matter, just something simple that doesn't sound defensive like "During the timeframe of the review, I was not seeing adults in my practice and x,y,z are inconsistent with how I run my practice."

Another thing I've heard of people around here doing, and something I suspect my new primary doc might be doing, is asking your well established patients to review you online if they've been satisfied with your care. Then you sort of override the bad review with good ones. You can suggest they go to a different site than the one you found the bad review at, if you're worried they might see it. I've read a few articles that seem to suggest physicians have had good success with that strategy.

I'm sure it sucks, but for patients who've had a bad experience, sometimes that's their only recourse because the system isn't always set up to police itself. The one really bad, completely screwed up experience I had actually inspired me to give feedback on the docs I've had that I really liked. Never could figure out how to write the bad one, so I didn't.
 
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Well, on the flip side... you can always have people (including yourself) write positive reviews. I agree these sites are a bunch of bs but if anybody can write whatever, however, whenever, so be it... saturate the system!
 
Chimed, I'm really sorry to hear this. If it's really not a patient that wrote it, then what's going on is character defamation, and could be illegal. It's sad but our profession is really vulnerable to this and I don't see anyone doing much to address or prevent it. It's certainly much easier for nefarious people to commit slander what with the increasing role the internet plays in everything and also with it being so anonymous. That doesn't make it legal though.

Contacting the site administrator probably won't be very helpful, because how will the site administrator know that the person isn't really a patient, if in fact they're not? If the same person with the same IP address wrote a bunch of bad reviews, MAAYBE the site administrator would care but I doubt it. Those sites look to me like a bunch of clones that are really just vehicles for advertising.

If the person continues this business, I'd just get a lawyer and have them send a cease and desist letter or something.

If it IS a patient that wrote it, that's different. I think the AMA should get more active about this and push for laws that regulate those kinds of sites. Patients should have a right to rate their doctors and all, but currently, if one single patient is "angry" they can go online and write a whole series of bad reviews about a doctor. And obviously even a non-patient can do the same thing.

Honestly I would not go to a doctor rating site to pick my doctor. It plays to the absolute lowest common denominator.
 
It is an unfortunate situation but this is what medical practice has come to in the name of the 'free market' even though there isn't a free market in healthcare, and markets don't work in healthcare. some interesting articles on this issue, including physician ratings can be found here and here. I do not think patients use these sorts of sites in general to search for their doctor so it should not be an issue but I would suggest, as above, writing your own positive review and encouraging others to do the same. personally, i would just ignore it, but if it bothers it's something you can do to dilute the effect.
 
Sorry, but patients do use review sites to choose physicians. I came to medicine very late in life and haven't really chugged the doctor kool-aid, so I'll give my $0.02.

The effect is probably regional. If you live in a small town in which there are a handful of doctors in your community, you can likely do the word of mouth thing. If you live in a sizable city, where you have a lot to choose from, it's not so easy.

People I know tend to choose doctors via this basic algorhthm:
1. Get a list of who their insurance will let them see.
2. Ask friends if they have any recommendations.
3. Take the recs from 2 (if any) and compare them to 1.
4. Hit the internet.

This is how I choose my doctors. This is how most folks I know choose their doctors. I don't have a psychiatrist, but I do know friends who looked for one, and this is the same way they chose their shrinks. The decision isn't based on #4, but it factors in. Probably less than distance to ones home but more than where the doc got their degree.

I don't know anyone who uses Healthgrades or the many proprietary sites. But most folks I know look at Yelp and Google reviews.

I used them when I was looking for a PCP. The reviews were very handy. A couple mentioned what a nightmare parking in the area was. Good to know. A couple mentioned really long wait times. Also handy. When one person mentions poor bedside manner, I don't care. If a few people mention bad bedside manner and a few good bedside manner, I don't care. When everyone mentions bedside manner? Check.

Folks are right when they say that most patients aren't going to look at most of those websites. The sort of people that scrutinize sites like Healthgrades are of a certain sort.

But pretending that folks will not read reviews in things like Yelp and Google when searching for a doctor/psychiatrist is short-sighted and ill-informed. They do. Most folks I know do. Granted, folks will spend more time scrutinizing the web to find a good mechanic than a good doctor, but the thought process is the same.
 
This is why I don't google myself. Though it's really hard to get an appointment with a doctor anymore, especially a psychiatrist. When I ask people why they chose me, they usually say it's because I had th first available opening.
 
Thank you, everyone, for your comments and advice--I really do appreciate the thoughts and insight from each one of you!

I initially tried to ignore this, but the principle of the situation just kept eating at me. I think mainly because it makes me feel so vulnerable that essentially ANYONE can go online and write a negative review. I agree with notdeadyet that people DO look up doctors. Not only that, but future employers, friends, relatives, etc. do online searches of people all the time.There has to be a way to have some laws and regulations on these sites to protect against defamation. Hopefully that will happen someday. Unfortunately, it's going to take some major lawsuit to make this happen and I don't see it happening anytime soon. We should have the right to not let these website post our information on them.

From my perspective, even if this was a patient, the comments are still totally out of character with my practice style and they are still misleading. In our field, there is no way we will not piss off a patient or a patient's parents. For example, I had to call child protective services the other day on a parent. How pleased do you think they are? Does that mean this parent is going to write a negative online review now?

Any way, I did contact the website as recommended above. I don't expect anything will happen out it, but it's worth a try. Although I'll feel odd doing this, I might start asking some of my long term parents to go online and write a review. But I just feel weird about doing that. I'll let you guys know what happens.

Thanks!!!!
 
Depending on how seriously you think the false review might harm your reputation, you might want to talk to a lawyer who has experience with internet defamation. If you wanted to take this to that level, I imagine that the IP address of the person who submitted the review could be traced and could help establish if this might be the person who you had a problem with.

I tend to avoid even looking for these things about myself because I know I'd get very aggravated if I found a review that I didn't think was fair to me. However, there is one good reason for anyone in our field to keep Googling yourself: Until I googled myself, I didn't know that a "people search" site giving easy access to MY HOME ADDRESS was one of the first results for my name in Google. I pray that I got rid of that before any of my patients with poor boundaries found it. I'm not the type who volunteers personal info easily so it was kind of scary to see how easily this kind of personal info gets out there.
 
Regarding posting your own reviews anonymously as a patient, be careful as it can be blatantly obvious when comments are self-written reviews.

I read a review of a private practice psychiatrist where all of the comments looked like they were quotes from NY times best sellers. ie. "professional, insightful, maintains therapeutic boundaries!". 4 reviews all 5 stars. Perhaps more obvious to colleagues than patients.

If you truly believe that internet presence is going to have a significant impact on your ROI (which IMHO is next to zero, others are free to disagree), then create incentives for patients to submit online reviews such as... a fancy bookmark, a stick of chapstick, a calendar, or a free appointment.

As Sunlioness mentioned, you will be overwhelmed with patients knocking on your door simply because you have openings, not because you have the highest rating on Google.
 
I was only aware of physician rating sites such as healthgrades.com, vitals.com, etc. However, I didn't know Yelp had reviews on Psychiatrists until now. I've only ever used Yelp to find restaurants. Maybe we ought to have some h'ordeurves in our waiting rooms! 🙂

Anyways for anybody interested in some general stats, type in New York or Los Angeles> health + medical > doctors > psychiatrists to get a feel of the number of reviews of psychiatrists in the 2 largest cities in the US. Then sort by most rated and highest rated.

The results? Very few psychiatrists are even rated. Many cities do not even have reviews of Psychiatrists. Of the psychiatrists that have received reviews, most only have 1-2 reviews and they tend to be negative. OB seems to be the most reviewed, and understandably so.

Conclusion? There is relatively low internet traffic generated from these sites. Granted I am not the webmaster of Yelp to look at the number of daily hits. Having owned an operated a website myself, I assume less than 1-2 hits per day on average. There is simply very little public interest in posting and reading reviews of Psychiatrists online at this time.

Investing in an internet presence, IMHO would have little to no effect on your ROI. Insurance companies are footing most of the bill for your services and frankly they don't care to Google your name.
 
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F0nzie said:
Anyways for anybody interested in some general stats, type in New York or Los Angeles> health + medical > doctors > psychiatrists to get a feel of the number of reviews of psychiatrists in the 2 largest cities in the US. Then sort by most rated and highest rated.

The results? Very few psychiatrists are even rated. Many cities do not even have reviews of Psychiatrists. Of the psychiatrists that have received reviews, most only have 1-2 reviews and they tend to be negative. OB seems to be the most reviewed, and understandably so.
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I'm not sure how you're doing your search. When I go to google and type in:
Los Angeles psychiatrist reviews
the first link I get is Yelp.

I agree with you that the "health grade" type websites are low traffic and low yield. But the actual review sites that folks do use (e.g.: Yelp, Google, etc.) are high traffic and high yield. For healthcare providers? Not so much, but it's growing.

If you go to Yelp and search for "psychiatrist" with Los Angeles as your location, you will get 207 results. Of the first 40 that came back on the list, everyone had at least one rating. Most had 1-4, some as many as 10. You have to get down to the 60th or so listing before you get all the psychiatrists with no evaluations.

It might be regional, but out where I live folks do use Google and Yelp when considering doctors. Most people I know do this. And it's a trend that's only going to grow. I think that most marketing lectures targeting practices will emphasize the importance of online marketing and social networking. Pretending psychiatry is somehow exempt and that folks somehow treat it as a unique service is probably risky.
 
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There's a company call Reputation.com that I hear advertised on NPR--"helping doctors (and other professionals) manage their online reputations." Might be worth checking out?

I'm with Sunlioness--much too terrified to google myself. :scared:
 
notdeadyet said:
It might be regional, but out where I live folks do use Google and Yelp when considering doctors. Most people I know do this. And it's a trend that's only going to grow. I think that most marketing lectures targeting practices will emphasize the importance of online marketing and social networking. Pretending psychiatry is somehow exempt and that folks somehow treat it as a unique service is probably risky.
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While I agree with you that this will be a growing trend. I think that as long as we have a very dominant 3rd party payer system, this system may serve as a rate limiting step for Psychiatrists receiving online Yelp ratings that are as rampant as all the restaurants in town. The shortage of psychiatrists also plays a significant role because most patients don't have much of a choice. Patients cannot simply shop around and rate doctors are no longer accepting anymore patients.

I would also warn about the hype of marketing companies and social networking that try to scam doctors into buying online marketing packages with no proven effectiveness in a 3rd party payer system. I still have not seen any data that supports any significant increase in revenue.

Testing this hypothesis for one's future practice is simple. Provide a questionnaire to all the patients and ask who found out about your practice via Google or online ratings. It's pointless data though if you were practicing in an environment where there is a 3-6 month waiting period and nobody else is advertising. Isn't this your average city in the United States?
 
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I'm a resident, and fwiw:
When I was looking for a PMD for myself, I started with google maps to find doctors near me, then I looked at the rating sites just to make sure they weren't all bad, then I looked for their pictures online -- if you want to get to know someone, I think a picture is a good place to start. I also looked at their website if they had one because I appreciate someone who can get a decent site put together without being cheesy.
 
I looked up my psychiatrist on yelp today just to check and wow she has all perfect reviews! So cool for her!
 
Thank you everyone for your responses!

Update: I contacted the website, "Vitals", and requested that they take down the review that I did not believe was from a patient. I wrote them a lengthly e-mail giving the reasons I believed this was an erronous review. I also tried to explain to them that I am a trainee and even if the review was legit, that they should remove me from the site since I was still in training. In short, they basically said "no" and referred me to their legal department if I had any more questions. 😡 There are so many reasons this pisses me off, the least of which is they are using my name to make money when I haven't authorized them to. In principle, I really hope someone brings this issue to court so that some laws can be placed that gives us some control over which websites put our information up. I'm in no position to do that and really don't have the energy to pursue this any further.

I've contemplated responding to the review. I think I could actually word a response to make myself look good. But I just can't do it out of principle and would feel that I've sunk to their level. If I thought it was a real review, I might respond. I've decided that once I'm done with my fellowship I might ask some patients if they would write an online review of me. But until then, I'm just going to ignore it.
 
Many reviews are fake. When picking hotels, I evaluate the likelihood that the latest reviews are real, because most hotels post fake reviews - they aren't hard to spot.

Why waste time on this when you could write your own positive reviews? Problem solved.
 
Chimed said:
Thank you everyone for your responses!

Update: I contacted the website, "Vitals", and requested that they take down the review that I did not believe was from a patient. I wrote them a lengthly e-mail giving the reasons I believed this was an erronous review. I also tried to explain to them that I am a trainee and even if the review was legit, that they should remove me from the site since I was still in training. In short, they basically said "no" and referred me to their legal department if I had any more questions. 😡 There are so many reasons this pisses me off, the least of which is they are using my name to make money when I haven't authorized them to. In principle, I really hope someone brings this issue to court so that some laws can be placed that gives us some control over which websites put our information up. I'm in no position to do that and really don't have the energy to pursue this any further.

I've contemplated responding to the review. I think I could actually word a response to make myself look good. But I just can't do it out of principle and would feel that I've sunk to their level. If I thought it was a real review, I might respond. I've decided that once I'm done with my fellowship I might ask some patients if they would write an online review of me. But until then, I'm just going to ignore it.
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WHAT?? They sound like complete jerks. This is unfortunate and somehow not surprising since it takes an a**hole to mine physician NPI's and profit off of their reputations. Basically their response is "Your distress over us keeping this ONE DEROGATORY POST is completely inconsequential to our bottom line... yet we simply won't delete it." This is very upsetting, but I'm glad that you tried.

I don't know what the legal aspects are in this particular scenario, or how it would be legally different than rating a restaurant in town. NPI's are public information and each state offers online access to physician information, hx, disciplinary action, etc, via their medical board website. That said, what prohibits companies such as vitals.com from data mining and facilitating reviews? On major difference between medical board websites and rating sites, is that medical board sites do not use SEO to facilitate webcrawlers to populate hits attached to your name on major search engines such as Google.

I agree with your final statement. Ignore it for now.
 
F0nzie said:
WHAT?? They sound like complete jerks. This is unfortunate and somehow not surprising since it takes an a**hole to mine physician NPI's and profit off of their reputations. Basically their response is "Your distress over us keeping this ONE DEROGATORY POST is completely inconsequential to our bottom line... yet we simply won't delete it." This is very upsetting, but I'm glad that you tried.
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That's what I said. Here is a direct line from their e-mail: "We are unable to preferentially remove or suppress entries on request and physicians may not decline listing with our service." What! Are you kidding me?!? They make it sound like this is some kinda of legitimate site and removing a review would be "against their standards." I don't even want to start thinking about it again because it just frustrates me to no end. Honestly, I realize that in the end of the day it might not be a big deal. It's really the principle of the whole thing that has me mad.

Can't we have an online review site that reviews online review sites?
 
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I do have some more advice for you that may work but the results may not be immediate.

Several years ago I removed my NPI number from a 3rd party data mining site. I removed my NPI as well as my wife's who is also a physician. Consequently, neither of our names are currently visible on Google search engines in association with these sites or searchable on the sites themselves. My wife, however, still appears on healthgrades.com for some reason (several nondescript 5/5 star reviews) *jealous*. Furthermore, I am no longer searchable on their databases. Pretty much all my attendings and colleagues have 3-5 physician rating sites listed on Google's search engines.

Now here's the bad news, I do not recall exactly which site the 3rd party NPI site was. However, it might be this site http://npidb.org/faqs/ and it could be that they simply updated the webdesign and I do not recognize it (it has been several years). However, I do clearly remember an FAQ sharing resemblance that allowed for removing your name for extra privacy.

Read and follow the directions of the 2nd FAQ:

"Why is my personal information being displayed here?
It is not our intent to display your personal information. We respect your right to privacy and we will never, knowingly, display your personal & confidential information to the general public. The information we display on this site is based on the information you filled out while applying for an NPI number from the CMS. The address and phone number(s) are extracted from the practicing address fields in your application. If you find that this information is incorrect or should not be published at all, simply email us and we will be happy to make the necessary changes or remove your profile altogether, if that is what you wish. You can also refer to our corrections page to make these changes online."

My hypothesis is these physician review sites hit up a 3rd party NPI registry, such as this one, that updates itself at specified intervals.Therefore, if my hypothesis is accurate your name could disappear from vitals.com if it is no longer active in the 3rd party NPI database. This would make sense because if you ever visit the real NPI database (https://nppes.cms.hhs.gov/NPPES/Welcome.do), it's a pain to navigate and may be burdensome for physician rating sites to engage in data mining when they can simply update themselves using a 3rd party NPI site that has the information more readily accessible.

Hope this helps. Try it out and give it a year or so!
 
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F0nzie said:
I do have some more advice for you that may work but the results may not be immediate.

Several years ago I removed my NPI number from a 3rd party data mining site. I removed my NPI as well as my wife's who is also a physician. Consequently, neither of our names are currently visible on Google search engines in association with these sites or searchable on the sites themselves. My wife, however, still appears on healthgrades.com for some reason (several nondescript 5/5 star reviews) *jealous*. Furthermore, I am no longer searchable on their databases. Pretty much all my attendings and colleagues have 3-5 physician rating sites listed on Google's search engines.

Now here's the bad news, I do not recall exactly which site the 3rd party NPI site was. However, it might be this site http://npidb.org/faqs/ and it could be that they simply updated the webdesign and I do not recognize it (it has been several years). However, I do clearly remember an FAQ sharing resemblance that allowed for removing your name for extra privacy.

Read and follow the directions of the 2nd FAQ:

"Why is my personal information being displayed here?
It is not our intent to display your personal information. We respect your right to privacy and we will never, knowingly, display your personal & confidential information to the general public. The information we display on this site is based on the information you filled out while applying for an NPI number from the CMS. The address and phone number(s) are extracted from the practicing address fields in your application. If you find that this information is incorrect or should not be published at all, simply email us and we will be happy to make the necessary changes or remove your profile altogether, if that is what you wish. You can also refer to our corrections page to make these changes online."

My hypothesis is these physician review sites hit up a 3rd party NPI registry, such as this one, that updates itself at specified intervals.Therefore, if my hypothesis is accurate your name could disappear from vitals.com if it is no longer active in the 3rd party NPI database. This would make sense because if you ever visit the real NPI database (https://nppes.cms.hhs.gov/NPPES/Welcome.do), it's a pain to navigate and may be burdensome for physician rating sites to engage in data mining when they can simply update themselves using a 3rd party NPI site that has the information more readily accessible.

Hope this helps. Try it out and give it a year or so!
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Thanks! 👍 I went ahead and delete my information from that site.
 
speaking of privacy, those of you too chicken to google yourself, might want to do it anyway or at least google your personal email addresses. apparently a couple of state medical board web sites will not only post the address you list with them (hopefully a business address) but also your email address. know a few people that discovered their personal email address at yahoo or gmail was listed for all the world to see on their medical board profile online. not something i'd want out there if I was working with pts with boundary issues...
 
wholeheartedly said:
speaking of privacy, those of you too chicken to google yourself, might want to do it anyway or at least google your personal email addresses. apparently a couple of state medical board web sites will not only post the address you list with them (hopefully a business address) but also your email address. know a few people that discovered their personal email address at yahoo or gmail was listed for all the world to see on their medical board profile online. not something i'd want out there if I was working with pts with boundary issues...
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Good advice. A buddy of mine had a pin drop on his house whenever he typed "his name M.D." on Google Maps. He was really pissed.
 
F0nzie said:
Good advice. A buddy of mine had a pin drop on his house whenever he typed "his name M.D." on Google Maps. He was really pissed.
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I didn't realize how much personal information was out here until my husband and I were buying a house recently. Property transactions are public records and are readily available. I am glad that the house is under my husband's name (a non-doctor) and we have different last names (unless we get divorced, then I am out of luck! :laugh:) But unfortunately, there is a lot of personal information out there for anyone who wants to look for it.

Speaking of doctor's reviews, once I was looking for an office address of an acquaintance (non-psychiatry), and I stumbled onto to her reviews, which were mostly negative ones (1 or 2 stars). Surprisingly, her office is usually full of patients and I've heard she is doing well financially. So, I am not sure if there's a correlation between bad reviews and the health of one's practice. But it did change my impression of her as a clinician.
 
United Healthcare has a tool where a covered patient can search it's network of doctors and see what the average wait time is, the general patient demographics of the practice, as well as what medications are prescribed and procedures performed for pre-defined ailments (given as percentages based on claims data). This is a much more objective way to choose a doctor than subjective review sites that may simply be a reflection of patients with extremely positive or negative emotions toward the physician.

The rationale, of course, for both approaches is that patient dissatisfaction with initial visits increases healthcare costs as the additional claims are submitted for reimbursement when the patient seeks a second, third or fourth physician before finding the right fit.
 
Thank you, got my profile removed!
 
Chimed said:
So I googled my name a few months ago and found that one of these doctor review sites had a review of me. It was not a very flattering review and the person gave me all 1's out of 4...However, for reasons I won't get into, I have reason to believe it was not a patient who wrote this, but rather someone who I had a falling out with. The wording of the review was not consistent with how I practice or what I do during my evaluations or return visits. Also, the timing of the review is suspect. It also was the perspective of an adult patient and I haven't seen adults in several years. I really don't mean this to sound narcissistic and I'm not saying I'm perfect, but I really do get extremely good feedback through my clinic from patients, families, and attendings. I've also never had a patient "fire" me. I can only think of situations in the emergency room where a patient would not have liked being admitted against their will that would have caused a grudge against me.

As I'm sure we all do, I put a lot of effort into my clinic developmental and care very much about patient care. So, having one bad review (from likely not even a patient of mine!) become a permanent record on a web site that has no verification that this was even a patient is extremely upsetting to me. 😡 This means that anytime someone does a search on me, this review will come up for many years. I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised, given that we work in a field that is hard not to upset some of our patients--borderlines, addicts not getting benzos, etc.

I'm curious if anyone has had this happened to them. Also, I could really use some advice on how to deal with this. Is there a way to delete this or control what is found on google? I thought about contacting the site to tell them this may not even be a patient, but stopped out of concerned that if they contacted that person, it could just make things worse. Also, contacting the person I think may have written this would also not be a good idea and I'm afraid it might just provoke more problems.

Any thoughts or advice?
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Hi there,

I realize this issue occured awhile back, but hopefully I can be of assistance in regards to your above concern.

I would recommend the following:

Contact the webmaster of the rating site and advise them of your suspicions (i.e. your strongly suspect that the rater in question was not a patient of yours.) Of significant note, some rating sites will remove a patient rating if you indicate a patient has uniquely indentified themselves with their rating.

Try not to worry about this fire and brimstone rating; it ain't no thang.

Cheers.
 
ghost dog said:
Hi there,

I realize this issue occured awhile back, but hopefully I can be of assistance in regards to your above concern.

I would recommend the following:

Contact the webmaster of the rating site and advise them of your suspicions (i.e. your strongly suspect that the rater in question was not a patient of yours.) Of significant note, some rating sites will remove a patient rating if you indicate a patient has uniquely indentified themselves with their rating.

Try not to worry about this fire and brimstone rating; it ain't no thang.

Cheers.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I did that. They basically said they would not remove the rating.
 
TexasPhysician said:
Why waste time on this when you could write your own positive reviews? Problem solved.
Click to expand...

This sounds like a good option to me. If the rating system's screen is so bad that you can actually do this (and I am sure you can), the site deserves it. Let their laziness cut both ways. If enough people do it then everyone will either be skeptical of those sites or the sites will have to implement some form of ID verification.

Given how few people review on these sites posting five or so great reviews from different computers seems like enough to make you a star!
 
Handy logic. You can also use it to shoplift at liquor stores with poor security. Or cheat on taxes due to poor oversight.

Corrupting public review sites to your favor because you can is weak ethically. Most of the majors allow for the person reviewed to write a rebuttal. This is appropriate. Lying to increase your rating is just bad juju.
 
notdeadyet said:
Handy logic. You can also use it to shoplift at liquor stores with poor security. Or cheat on taxes due to poor oversight.
Click to expand...

No it isn't. The liquor store's poor security does not directly harm you. The alleged poor oversight on taxes does not directly harm you either (by the way, give that a shot and let us know how the audit goes!). Allowing people to post as many reviews of you as they like with no ID verification directly harms you. The OP requested that they change their system to avoid this and they refuse; I believe there is a difference in exploiting an obviously broken system that directly harms you and in exploiting a trust-based system that does not.

Do you not see the flaw in resigning ourselves to not just accepting but embracing (lending legitimacy by responding online) such an obviously flawed system?
 
Bartelby said:
Allowing people to post as many reviews of you as they like with no ID verification directly harms you. The OP requested that they change their system to avoid this and they refuse
Click to expand...
Of course they refused. Review sites like Yelp could not exist if they tried to verify the experience of everyone reviewing their local taco place, mechanic, or psychiatrist. Readers of these sites understand that there will be crackpots posting. Cost of doing business. Raging against Yelp for not ensuring every posters opinion is valid is about as well spent a tirade as rallying against Match.com for not verifying their posters height and weight.
Bartelby said:
I believe there is a difference in exploiting an obviously broken system that directly harms you and in exploiting a trust-based system that does not.
Click to expand...
Everyone's honesty and integrity probably has a price, but a bad Yelp review is kind of setting the price point a little low, no?
Bartelby said:
Do you not see the flaw in resigning ourselves to not just accepting but embracing (lending legitimacy by responding online) such an obviously flawed system?
Click to expand...
If I did, I'd find it awfully hard to work with private insurance patients...

it's called adapting to a new technology. You can embrace it, you can adapt to it, or you can exploit its anonymity by lying to curry favor. Doing the latter makes you part of the problem and i'd consider it very ethically questionable. I'd avoid law firms that did this and would certainly not send anyone to physicians that did.

Just my $0.02. At the end of the day, I'm probably a little uptight on integrity issues. Go with your gut, but don't be surprised if the lying approach raises some eyebrows in others.
 
notdeadyet said:
Just my $0.02. At the end of the day, I'm probably a little uptight on integrity issues. Go with your gut, but don't be surprised if the lying approach raises some eyebrows in others.
Click to expand...

I tend to be pretty uptight on many issues too (having never cheated or stolen in any meaningful context), and I avoid lying. I still think that posting positive reviews on a site that actively promotes libel against you can be seen as a form of protest ("look how broken this system is") rather than a form of self-serving promotion. If problems like the above continue, I don't think it would be a bad thing if everyone started flooding their rating systems with garbage ratings so that the anonymity issue would have to be addressed.

That said if I were in that situation I probably would not write my own reviews, at least not yet. Everyone knows that psychiatrists will get the odd bad review as a hazard of the job, and as long as it isn't a pattern you would probably be okay. It does frustrate me though that sites like these do not even make an effort to provide integrity in their own dealings, saying essentially "eff you, lawyer up" if you have a problem with the arguably quite unethical way they conduct business. I even heard that Yelp! offers to remove unfavorable reviews for those who pay them money for some "premium membership" to do so. I think forcing more accountability into these systems could be a great thing, because they could be such a valuable resource if conducted with integrity.
 
😀
Bartelby said:
I tend to be pretty uptight on many issues too (having never cheated or stolen in any meaningful context), and I avoid lying. I still think that posting positive reviews on a site that actively promotes libel against you can be seen as a form of protest ("look how broken this system is") rather than a form of self-serving promotion. If problems like the above continue, I don't think it would be a bad thing if everyone started flooding their rating systems with garbage ratings so that the anonymity issue would have to be addressed.

That said if I were in that situation I probably would not write my own reviews, at least not yet. Everyone knows that psychiatrists will get the odd bad review as a hazard of the job, and as long as it isn't a pattern you would probably be okay. It does frustrate me though that sites like these do not even make an effort to provide integrity in their own dealings, saying essentially "eff you, lawyer up" if you have a problem with the arguably quite unethical way they conduct business. I even heard that Yelp! offers to remove unfavorable reviews for those who pay them money for some "premium membership" to do so. I think forcing more accountability into these systems could be a great thing, because they could be such a valuable resource if conducted with integrity.
Click to expand...

As a chronic pain doc, I'm no stranger to this type of physician "rating system". I believe the most well known one is rateMDs.

After a thorough review of this site, a few things become obvious:

1. Family MDs, obs/gyne, and psychiatrists tend to be rated quite frequently.
2. A lot of posters rate more than once. A LOT of posters come on merely to libel docs,and are pissed off that they didn't get their drug of choice. I see this from my ratings.

3. People are idiots. Don't sweat it. 😀
 
I take issue with point 2. I know you're mainly just trying to reassure the OP and he really shouldn't sweat it too much.

OPs specific situation aside, most people on here will agree that the most dangerous people in medicine are those unwilling to consider the possibility that they might be wrong, or those unwilling to admit they've made a mistake.

But when the discussion comes up it's always the patient or other person that's wrong, or they must be upset the didn't get the med they wanted, or whatever other generalization. Any time there's a malpractice news posting, everyone goes on how the patient must be greedy and money grubbing, if a patient complains it was because the doc did the right thing and didn't give in to what the patient wanted. There doesn't seem to be much consideration that perhaps there was some truth to it.

Yet you look at the other threads on here and you guys repeatedly note providers who've done stupid things to your patients: turfing ED patients to you without doing appropriate medical evals first, over prescribing or inappropriate prescribing, or sheer apathy on the part of the providers.

You don't think those are docs patients complain about on those online review sites too? I'd wager that a good chunk of the kinds of docs you guys grumble about are the same docs online review patients are grumbling about. No, some patients don't have good insight about what constitutes quality care, and some are just jerks or idiots, but the average person can make some reasonable assessments.

Review sites aren't ideal, but neither are other options available for patients to address problems with physicians. I don't think overgeneralizing about a patient's motives are helpful either. Some docs actually do need to take a step back and ask if they are doing something to generate those negative reviews that might be an area for improvement. There have been several articles posted by docs who've done this honest reflection, talked to patients, and then improved those areas to benefit their practices and patients.

I'm sure it's horrible getting unjust reviews, but it's also horrible having a bad experience and no recourse. People just want to recommend the good ones, or save someone else from the same negative situation. That's generally the real motivation.

/end soapbox

And ghost doc, you've got a particularly challenging and already frustrated, rather stigmatized, patient population who've probably hit you as a last resort which poses a whole different set of issues.


ghost dog said:
😀

As a chronic pain doc, I'm no stranger to this type of physician "rating system". I believe the most well known one is rateMDs.

After a thorough review of this site, a few things become obvious:

1. Family MDs, obs/gyne, and psychiatrists tend to be rated quite frequently.
2. A lot of posters rate more than once. A LOT of posters come on merely to libel docs,and are pissed off that they didn't get their drug of choice. I see this from my ratings.

3. People are idiots. Don't sweat it. 😀
Click to expand...
 
wholeheartedly said:
OPs specific situation aside, most people on here will agree that the most dangerous people in medicine are those unwilling to consider the possibility that they might be wrong, or those unwilling to admit they've made a mistake.
Click to expand...

But consider this (not uncommon) scenario: an alcoholic with a long history of abusing other medications (amphetamines and opioids) has been addicted to benzodiazepines for years. He got them from his family doctor, who escalated the dose up. He also buys them off the streets. He has now lost that prescription because he has been transferred to your care. He is begging for you to continue and increase the dosage. Recognizing that you would be fostering more substance dependence you say no, offering a plan to taper the benzodiazepines in a safe way but refusing to continue prescribing where there is no valid indication for their ongoing use. The patient is furious, wants to know why f*** you will not give him the only thing that has helped him (and man, it has helped him). He gets very tense and on the verge of screaming in your face about this refusal.

When that guy goes online and posts four bad reviews about how bad you are, I personally don't think you have to sit up all night wondering if you did the right thing to not give him benzodiazepines. You did. However, there are some who would just cave and give the patient the benzos and by these rating systems they would be seen as the "better" doctor.

So I understand that we have to be open to feedback and criticism as doctors, and we do not always know best, but in some disputes there are pretty clear legal and ethical guidelines that let you know that you have made the right decisions. It doesn't mean that patient will not hate you for it.
 
Chimed said:
So I googled my name a few months ago and found that one of these doctor review sites had a review of me. It was not a very flattering review and the person gave me all 1's out of 4...However, for reasons I won't get into, I have reason to believe it was not a patient who wrote this, but rather someone who I had a falling out with. The wording of the review was not consistent with how I practice or what I do during my evaluations or return visits. Also, the timing of the review is suspect. It also was the perspective of an adult patient and I haven't seen adults in several years. I really don't mean this to sound narcissistic and I'm not saying I'm perfect, but I really do get extremely good feedback through my clinic from patients, families, and attendings. I've also never had a patient "fire" me. I can only think of situations in the emergency room where a patient would not have liked being admitted against their will that would have caused a grudge against me.

As I'm sure we all do, I put a lot of effort into my clinic developmental and care very much about patient care. So, having one bad review (from likely not even a patient of mine!) become a permanent record on a web site that has no verification that this was even a patient is extremely upsetting to me. 😡 This means that anytime someone does a search on me, this review will come up for many years. I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised, given that we work in a field that is hard not to upset some of our patients--borderlines, addicts not getting benzos, etc.

I'm curious if anyone has had this happened to them. Also, I could really use some advice on how to deal with this. Is there a way to delete this or control what is found on google? I thought about contacting the site to tell them this may not even be a patient, but stopped out of concerned that if they contacted that person, it could just make things worse. Also, contacting the person I think may have written this would also not be a good idea and I'm afraid it might just provoke more problems.

Any thoughts or advice?
Click to expand...

hahaha...this is hilarious.

You have spent way too much time thinking about/worrying about something so ridiculous.....

I would actually relish in the fact that someone gave me a poor "online review".......anyone who is going online to rate their psychiatrist is probably:

1) borderline
2) a frustrated addict who you turned down

put it out of your mind. thinking about such a silly matter isnt worth it.
 
Bartelby, I acknowledged that there are patients like that and no I don't think docs need to spend time stressing about those reviews. I also acknowledged that I can't imagine how much it would suck to be on the receiving end of a lot of those. At the same time, those reviews tend to stand out as being written by someone irate and unreasonable and most people are going to take them with a grain of salt. Those that don't probably aren't patients you want to see anyway.

My point was that I don't think those are the majority (although that might depend on specialty type and practice setup) and that it isn't a good thing to make the sweeping generalization that most people post reviews that are unjustified or with malicious intent as seems to be the general conclusion around here.

You've all seen and noted poor providers, patients will note these individuals too and review some of them online. That was my only point, just to take a more middle ground perspective instead of knee-jerk righteous indignation.

I do have concerns about those sites, including those expressed, as well as the opposite issue where patients talk up a doc who's gotten repeatedly sanctioned by the board is has just barely managed to hang on to a license because that doc is "nice" and "accessible."

Just out of curiosity I checked reviews on some of my docs and physician friends and colleagues. Their reviews were mostly positive and balanced with things like "seems to listen well and calls back quickly with results, but unfortunately is difficult to get an appointment with an has long wait times in the waiting room."

Sometimes patients don't have good insight into what constitutes quality care, and sometimes they do.
 
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