Member-only story
The Myth of Patient Satisfaction Scores Needs to Be Exposed
What do you want when searching for a new healthcare provider, and do these scores tell you what you need to know?
Choosing a new healthcare provider can be a taxing and unreliable process, mainly if we depend solely on online patient satisfaction surveys of provider ratings. Occasionally, reviews in other areas, such as book publishing, open our eyes to how these surveys or reviews are rife with manipulation; therefore, naively believing them isn’t a great idea.
When your health and, possibly, your life are the issues where you need guidance, more than an ounce of care is required. But surveys continue, and so we should continue to question their veracity. One rating of hospitals is highly regarded, and that is provided by The Leapfrog Group.
But what about those “best hospital” or “best physician” plaques you see in medical offices? Who gets to provide the ratings? I know of one plastic surgeon whose name you’ll never find there, and yet he has world-renowned patients in finance, entertainment, and politics who travel from all over the globe to see him.
One major problem with these satisfaction reviews is that they do not tell you anything about whether a doctor is good at healing patients; instead, they can lead to avoidable medical expenses, avoidable injuries…
