Comparing Doctor Ratings and Review Sites: Healthgrades, RateMDs, Vitals, More

Patient ratings (five-star scale) and comments are provided for primary care doctors and dentists practicing in the seven metropolitan areas where Consumers' Checkbook magazine is published. Specialists and other practicing physicians in the U.S. are included in the database but don't have consumer ratings or comments. However, specialists "most often recognized by their peers" receive a special designation based on doctor responses to a survey that Checkbook conducts.The site also covers healthcare-related providers like acupuncturists and chiropractors, along with home services like plumbing and appliance repair.

Cost: $28 for a one-year subscription (discounts for multi-year subscriptions), covering seven metropolitan areas. (Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, Seattle-Tacoma, Twin Cities, and Washington DC). Members also receive printed guides and a magazine.

Overall ease of use: Very easy to use and navigate. Look up physicians by name or browse by location and/or specialty. Your subscription only allows you to rate the physicians and other service providers in your metropolitan area.

Validation and confidentiality: Reviews must be made by member-submitted paper forms or online forms. Doctors are not notified about any reviews received or the identity of the reviewers. Removal or editing requests are considered by staff.

No conflict of interest: Checkbook is an independent non-profit organization, takes no corporate donations, and is 100% supported by member subscriptions and donations. Doctors may not purchase profiles or advertise.

Healthgrades

This enormous database contains more than eight million reviews for licensed U.S. physicians and dentists. Patient ratings (five-star scale) and comments are included.The chief executive officer and the president of Healthgrades are both former executives from WebMD.

Cost: Free to consumers, but has extensive advertising. Doctors and health systems pay for profile and "patient engagement resources" that include a system for collecting and monitoring patient reviews.Also, pharmaceutical ads are targeted and linked to certain physician profiles.

Overall ease of use: Easy to use and look up physicians by name or browse by location and/or specialty. On the form to leave a review, it is very surprising that the default value is 3 stars.

Validation and confidentiality: All reviews go through a validation process: you must submit your email address or phone number to validate your review. In other words, you are setting up an account with Healthgrades in order to add a review. Doctors have the opportunity to respond to patient satisfaction surveys, and web site users may view doctor responses. Healthgrades staff may remove a survey after a doctor has flagged it if they deem it violates editorial policy. Patients don't have the ability to edit their reviews. Surprisingly, the full names (first and last) of many reviewers are included with the published reviews. Patients should be careful about setting up the required email account to not include their full name if they don't want that information published online. The Terms of Use state that "Healthgrades uses proprietary processes and algorithms to select, compile and adjust certain data to generate ratings of the Healthcare Providers ("Ratings")." This makes the consumer wonder how ratings could be adjusted, since they don't explain the algorithm used to adjust the generated ratings.

Potential conflict of interest: Healthgrades sells services to physicians, including an appointment-making service and advertising, so it is likely that those paying for these services will have more favorable profiles on the site. The site is run by "Healthgrades Corporate." which is one of the RVO Brands. Healthgrades Corporate reveals that advertisers also include healthcare systems and pharmaceutical (or "life sciences" companies) who want to reach the patient before they go to the doctor. Sophisticated marketing techniques help identify patients most likely to ask for certain medications. Healthgrade's partner site "WriteMD" helps the pharma companies target the "highest quality" patients who are seeking treatment from "high quality" (or frequent) prescribers of the particular drug being marketed. "Healthgrades" website (in the section for advertisers) notes that pharma advertisers can steer search results towards doctors more likely to prescribe brand name drugs. The connected marketing network includes the syndicated sites, including Medical News Today, Sharecare, PsychCentral and Healthline, as well as Healthgrades and others. Your data may be shared with those partner brands as listed on  RVO Brands site.

Be careful about ads you see on these sites, which may be linked to the doctor's profile. WriteMD states that "WriteMD worked with our client to identify the high-value prescribers for their brand, then launched brand-exclusive takeovers on 1,058 priority specialists’ profiles on healthgrades.com.  " In other words, you won't see competing medications' ads for certain prescribers.

RateMDs

Contains about 2 million physician and dentist ratings. The site says that it also includes naturopaths, chiropractors, psychologists, midwives, acupuncturists, and nurse practitioners. Patient ratings (five-star scale) and comments are included. All submissions are moderated before being posted and may be removed if flagged for a valid reason. The "FAQ" section includes some questions and answers related to negative reviews and libel concerns.

Cost: free to patients; doctors may pay for advertising on their profiles.

Overall ease of use: When you go to the site, it automatically places you in search-lookup mode for your geographic area, based on your computer's location. If you don't allow access to your location, it will search "the world," likely not giving you good results. It can be difficult to search by city, specialty and name, as the different form fields are in separate parts of the page. If you are searchig for a particular doctor, use the form field at the top of the page to search by doctor name. The site contains heavy advertising; if possible, use a browser where the ads are disabled to avoid the distractions. It is not clear what the source is for the database of doctors. If you can't find your doctor, you may use a form to add the physician to the database.

The rating form lets you add ratings for the various quality measures (helpfulness, staff, punctuality, and knowledge). It also requires you to also leave at least a 50 character comment in the "comments" field, so you will need to leave about a sentence or 7 or so words. However, you are not required to sign up for an account to leave a review. Overall, this is the easiest site for contributing a doctor review.

Validation and confidentiality: This site allows the most anonymity of the three major sites profiled above. Users may submit ratings without creating an account and without email or text verification. However, the web site uses other means, such as using IP address and computer identity to detect if you have submitted a review more than once. Optionally, users may create an account, allowing them to track reviews and edit their ratings over time. RateMDS lets doctors hide up to 3 ratings on their profile that they deem to be suspicious. However, the actual rating score will still be represented in the average star rating score.

Potential conflict of interest: RateMDs sells its services to physicians, including an appointment-making service and advertising, and doctors paying for advertising tend to show up first in search results. However, because this (and Yelp) seem to be the only free doctor ratings sites that are NOT affiliated with Press Ganey, it seems that these reviews could be more authentic since they are unsolicited; the raters are self-motivated to add a review and not prompted by their doctor. This site is at least worth taking a look at in conjunction with some of the others.