Web MD

When doctors, patients and the Internet collide, trust can get smashed in the middle. Will patients believe the positive reviews they see online for the “lifesaver” pediatrician or a “great” orthopedist? Will doctors’ reputations be dragged down by disgruntled and anonymous commenters?

It turns out everyone can loosen up a bit, according to a pair of researchers in the Robert H. Smith School of Business.

In a new report, Gordon Gao, associate professor of business, and Ritu Agarwal, professor of business, demonstrate that those online reviews do reflect patient satisfaction fairly accurately.

“There are multiple ways to measure a doctor, and the online reviews are a good way to measure the patient experience—the doctor’s listening ability, how nice he or she is, cleanliness of the office,” said Gao, the lead author.

Meanwhile, patients actually don’t tend to venture online to sling mud at doctors very much, he said. In fact, a better measure of bad doctors might be a lack of online reviews, perhaps because the worst might be practicing in areas with low rates of Internet access, or because patients fear doctors will sniff out bad reviews and retaliate, the authors say.

Along with coauthors Brad N. Greenwood Ph.D. ’13 of Temple University and Jeffrey McCollough of the University of Minnesota, Gao and Agarwal compared online reviews with the results of surveys designed by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to reach their conclusions, which was published in September’s MIS Quarterly.

But Gao warns there’s more to doctor quality than patient satisfaction. Because most patients can’t fully judge a doctor’s true acumen, he and collaborators are working to delve into clinical skill, knowledge and outcomes as well.

“Our work shows the reviews are a good way to find a doctor you can communicate well with,” he said. “But it’s not a good way to judge their clinical skills.”