Web-Based Physician Ratings for California Physicians on Probation

Area of Science:

• Medical Board Oversight
• Healthcare Consumerism
• Physician Performance Metrics

Background:

• Online physician rating systems are widely used by patients to assess doctors.
• These platforms provide information on licensure, office hours, and disciplinary actions.
• The correlation between patient ratings and actual quality of care remains uncertain.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of physician probation on consumer-generated online ratings.
• To compare website ratings of physicians on probation with matched controls.

Main Methods:

• Retrospective analysis of data from the Medical Board of California (1989-2015).
• Categorization of probation violations into nine types.
• Matching of physicians on probation with non-probation controls (2:1 ratio) by zip code and specialty.
• Collection of web-based ratings from vitals.com, healthgrades.com, and ratemds.com.

Main Results:

• Physicians on probation received slightly lower average ratings (3.7/5) compared to controls (4.0/5).
• Violations related to documentation, incompetence, prescription negligence, and fraud were associated with lower scores.
• Ratings for issues like professionalism, substance abuse, crime, sexual misconduct, and personal illness showed no significant difference between groups.

Conclusions:

• Web-based physician ratings are lower for doctors on probation, suggesting a patient-perceived difference.
• The absolute difference in ratings was small, indicating these sites are imperfect proxies for physician competence.
• Further research is needed to understand what physician web-based ratings truly measure and their association with quality of care.