Doctors don’t want to be rated online, afraid to lose business

by Vlad on 8/03/2009

Doctors are making patients sign EULAs that make sure they can’t make any comments about them online (on websites like RateMDs). I think this is total garbage, and if your doctor is looking for you to sign something similar, get a new one. Wouldn’t it be funny if professors made you sign a paper that said you cant rate them at RateMyProfessor.com? What about having to sign something so you don’t rate products on Amazon or Epinions, that would be funny too.

“They’re basically forcing the patients to choose between health care and their First Amendment rights, and I really find that repulsive,” Swapceinski said.
[Docs seek gag orders to stop patients' reviews (AP)]

Luckily they will never be able to stop posting on the Internet and put “out of court settlement” into extinction. This is simply silly legislature, and the doctors that are complaining are clearly the bad ones. How about this suggestion: improve your practice so the reviews you get on the sites and blogs are good, then use that to sell yourself.

There are 5 comments in this article:

  1. 17/03/2009Taking all the wrong steps to solve all the wrong problems | digital parsimony says:

    [...] week, I wrote about doctors making patients sign EULAs that disallow them to give feedback on the services they received on [...]

  2. 30/03/2009Joe says:

    Rating doctors? There already are professional bodies called boards which rate doctors and make sure they are fit to practice. Practicing medicine, law, designing parts for engines or building bridges is not the same as selling stuff as Amazon does. There is a great deal of responsibility involved and ordinary lay people are not fit to know better – you can’t read Wikipedia or watch Oprah and conclude that a doctor is a quack because he didn’t send you or sent you for a battery of tests or missed something his peers would have missed. If you want better medical practice get your government (congress- whatever) to legislate better standards, CME and peer review of your medical professionals but judging a doctor on the basis of rants by clueless people seems counter intuitive and may even be dangerous – since who defines the criteria what a good doctor is or not in lay peoples’ minds?

    You have professional bodies, if you find fault with a diagnosis,
    get a second opinion and sue or report the practitioner. Stupid Web 2.0 idea, like the rest of Web 2.0.

    Joe.

  3. 30/03/2009Vlad says:

    You make a very good point but that’s like saying anything the FDA approves is worth consuming. When a doctor repeatedly harms clients, how would the clients spread awareness? Sure, they can settle something in a courtroom, but I don’t want to be going to that doctor. When you move to a new area, how do you find a doctor? Through referals from friends and co-workers based on their experiences. I think this is very similar and a definite outlet for someone to share a potentially life-threatening experience. A bad review won’t make or break my decision on a doctor, but repetitive horrible reviews will make me raise my brow.

  4. 22/10/2009Bob86 says:

    It is possible for optical answer sheets to be printed incorrectly, such that all ovals will be read as filled. ,

  5. 19/04/2011Shaking up the bizarre habits ingrained in primary health care | Digital Parsimony says:

    [...] yet email and online appointment scheduling is still “new”. I’ve written about this before, and I’m glad it’s coming to [...]

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