Abstract
BackgroundPhysician rating websites (PRWs) allow patients to rate, comment and discuss physicians’ quality online as a source of information for others searching for a physician. It is generally assumed that PRWs will only be helpful for users, and fair for the rated, if there are a high number of ratings. However, the number of ratings on PRWs remains low internationally and there is currently a lack of research examining the reasons why patients are not rating their physicians. The aim of this study is to therefore identify the spectrum of factors influencing people’s willingness to rate their physician on PRWs.MethodsA mailed cross-sectional survey sent to a random sample from 4 North German cities between April and July 2016. Fifty participants who had previously used PRWs but not rated a physician provided reasons for why that had not rated a physician in a free text response. Semi-structured qualitative telephone interviews were then conducted with 22 interested participants to explore factors influencing their willingness to rate their physician on PRWs in more detail.ResultsParticipants identified a total of 21 distinct incentives and disincentives for rating physicians on PRWs, which could be further categorised under the headings: user-specific, PRW-specific and physician-specific. Two key overarching groups of factors emerged: (1) factors concerning the physician-patient relationship, and (2) factors issues regarding technical aspects of PRWs.ConclusionThese findings will be helpful in guiding future research and health policy initiatives to increase the usefulness and fairness of PRWs.
Highlights
Physician rating websites (PRWs) allow patients to rate, comment and discuss physicians’ quality online as a source of information for others searching for a physician
While a number of empirical studies have indicated that PRWs are having some success in influencing patient decision-making and health care quality [11, 12], a number of short comings of PRWs have been identified in the literature [13]
Participants identified a total of 21 distinct incentives and disincentives for rating physicians on PRWs, which could be further categorised under the headings: user-specific, PRW-specific and physician-specific
Summary
Physician rating websites (PRWs) allow patients to rate, comment and discuss physicians’ quality online as a source of information for others searching for a physician. The aim of this study is to identify the spectrum of factors influencing people’s willingness to rate their physician on PRWs. The past decades have seen greater transparency around healthcare quality, with an increasing number of activities publically reporting quality information with the aims of supporting patient decision-making and quality improvement [1, 2]. Physicians rating websites (PRWs) represent a bottom-up public reporting approach with their emphasis on user generated content (Web 2.0), by allowing patients to rate and comment on physicians’ quality online as a form of electronic word of mouth [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. A recent study which examined the frequency of ratings and evaluation tendencies on a selection of German PRWs and compared this with 2010 data, indicates that the number of ratings per physicians remains low and very positive [14].
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