New website lets patients rate doctors

15 Jul 2008

Dr Neil Bacon founder of
www.iWantGreatCare.org

A website has been launched that allows patients to rate individual GPs and hospital doctors and share information about their healthcare experiences.

Visitors to the website, can rate their doctor using sliding scales for three questions: ‘Do you trust this doctor? Does this doctor listen? Would you recommend this doctor?’

Dr Neil Bacon, founder of www.iWantGreatCare.org, told E-Health Insider: “This is an opportunity to really help improve the care that doctors give.

“As a clinician, I’m very aware that patients are always looking for recommendations. This site will allow them to see other people’s recommendations and make their own, too.”

The website has been launched just a week after the final report of Lord Darzi’s Next Stage Review, High Quality Care for All.

It said that NHS Choices will be expanded to give patients a wider range of information about primary and community care services, including patient views on the success of their treatment and the quality of their experiences.

Dr Bacon said: “I have had discussions with the Department of Health and NHS Choices and they see this as complementary to what they are doing. It is possible that the views collected on the site will be integrated with NHS Choices in the future.”

Dr Bacon is also the founder of GP social networking website, www.doctors.net.uk, although he resigned as chief executive to take on this project, which has been funded through revenue from the earlier site.

He says the new site will offer opportunities for doctors. “Doctors have to meet certain patient satisfaction targets, and this sort of patient feedback could help to provide this,” he said. “It could also provide them with positive remarks to use in their personal portfolio, when they move jobs.”

The new site will also enable healthcare providers and managers to collect the views of patients for whom they are responsible, using real-time dashboards.

Patients can use the site anonymously, if they wish. The sliding scale questions should take less than a minute to complete. Free text boxes for comments are available, with filters in place to stop profanities. Moderators will check for posts that may be malicious campaigns against a healthcare provider.

Dr Bacon said the methods for collecting data differentiated it from competitors such as Patient Opinion, the independent website founded by a Sheffield GP for recording good and bad comments on hospital care.

“This site is aimed at providing satisfaction figures through the sliding scales for doctors – not organisations, like some of our competitors. The gathering of ratings on a scale of 1 to 100 makes us the only independent source of information in the UK to allow patients to choose a doctor based on the experience of fellow patients.”

Joe Fernandez

Reader's Comments

massively open to abuse

15 Jul 08 14:52

I'm not a clinician, however I do think this site leaves doctors open to malicious comments which could easily affect reputation.

Having looked briefly at the site, the fact that only a confirmation (sent via email which means that this is also open to abuse) is required by the reviewer after a 'cool off period', leaves individual clinicians open to all sorts of problems from disgruntled individuals who can hide behind pseudoanonymity.

Indeed given the search capabilities on the site (and the rather rather haphazard list of entries - why not a NHS Choices web service integration to go the whole hog!) there is nothing to prevent an individual reporting on any clinician whether they have been in contact with them or not.

There are many good examples of opinion from the public but dare I say this isn't one of them.

'Just because we can doesn't mean we should' - I wonder how long it will last?

Unreasonable

16 Jul 08 10:19

To be able to (anonymously) attack a doctors opinion without even the risk of a reply or justification... No, I don't think that's fair or right.

Counterproductive

16 Jul 08 14:13

This is going to be disastrous for psychiatists in particular as well as others such as GPs.

What the patient _needs_ does not necessarily equate to what the patient _wants_ , which may be an inappropriate sick-note, benzos, antibiotics etc.

This will just make it harder for doctors to remain dispassionately professional.

Web 2.0 ? another waste of time and money!

max.lock@live.co.uk

17 Jul 08 07:26

There is already a complaints procedure for patients if they believe they are not receiving the approriate care from medical professionals. This is just stupidity and technology for the sake of it. The data gleamed from patients entries will be less than useless.

I suppose the next step is for patients to covertly record their medical appointments and leave them on this website or YouTube.

Identifying correct doctor?

19 Jul 08 09:41

Having looked at the site, I am curious to know how the patient is sure that they have the correct doctor and don't inadvertently give feedback to the wrong person. Its more of a concern from the doctor's point of view of potentially receiving feedback not relating to you. Where did the doctors' names and details come from? Are they self submitted or do they come from GMC list or employers? I couldn't find most of the doctors I was looking for and of those I found I couldn't be sure if it was actually the right doctor or someone with the same name.

On the plus side

21 Jul 08 17:17

For people moving to a new area this site may prove a useful tool to find a GP that others have recommended. Some individuals may use this site to criticise doctors but some may also praise them.

For all those worried about bad reviews, you can guarantee if someone has criticisms of a practicioner they haven't kept those comments to themselves waiting for this outlet they are already airing their views.

Yes the site is open to abuse, but genuine opinion will also be made available to those that wish to look at the site.

re: identifying correct doctor... this seems like a 'pig in a poke'

21 Jul 08 17:37

...the list appears to be completely random - and several reports elsewhere have indicated that deceased doctors details have been listed. There are 2 GPs (out of a possible 8) listed at my local surgery and one of those left about 3 years ago. From a data management perspective this therefore raises several issues. If doctor A is listed at location X - how could somebody report their opinion in good faith? What is likely to happen is that a patient will list the doctor again at a separate location (so now we have doctor A at location Y as well as location X)

It certainly isn't a definitive list from the GMC and what is more there now appear to be several doctors taking action against the authors of the site which a Google search will reveal.

To compound the poor execution of this site, the rating scale uses a sliding scale o-100% for varying parameters - how can a doctor be 63% good at listening???

This is also not an original idea with RateMDs.com being an existing site that has got less than credible information on it and some poor taste entries as well including entries for the author of Iwantgood care.org

maybe this is one web 2.0 idea that should be dropped pretty quickly.

Come on EHI I think you need to delve into this further - not all web 2 ideas are good.

How can we even know the reviewers have seen the doctors?

23 Jul 08 10:06

I suppose the best parallel I can think of for this is reviewing hotels you've stayed in on lastminute.com or laterooms.com. However, all such sites allow you to review only hotels you have booked through their sites, so you can be pretty certain the reviewer has actually stayed there. How am I supposed to know the reviewers are even real patients and not malicious colleagues having a laugh?

Who'll be the first to review Dr Bacon? :)

or that the doctor even exists??

cunpr@globalnet.co.uk

23 Jul 08 16:01

Well I've been unable to find myself so I created an alter ego for them. I used the "register a doctor you've seen" facility to create a fictious doctor, then after they'd accepted that I then posted a comment on how brilliant he was.

Excellent - obviously a site with enormous potential and all the bugs ironed out - one we can all trust.

Regards Paul Cundy