Doctors Dominate

We humans pretend to resist domination, but actually tend to submit, and are often consciously unaware of the contradiction. I recently posted on our relating this way to police. We also relate this way to doctors. For example, people are basically scared to post negative web reviews of doctors. No, they don’t consciously feel scared. They’ll talk about how busy they are or they don’t feel qualified to judge. Yet their usual arrogance lets them rate lots of other things they know little about. And they are scared for good reason: doctors do got out of their way to retaliate against negative reviews. Details:

The Web Is Awash in Reviews, but Not for Doctors. Here’s Why.

… It is puzzling that there is no such authoritative collection of reviews for physicians, the highest-stakes choice of service provider that most people make. Sure, various Web sites like HealthGrades and RateMDs have taken their shots, and Yelp and Angie’s List have made a go of it, too. But the listings are often sparse, with few contributors and little of substance. … Not enough people take the time to review their doctors. …

RateMDs now has reviews of more than 1,370,000 doctors in the United States and Canada. But getting in the faces of the previously untouchable professional class has inevitably led to legal threats. He says he gets about one each week over negative reviews and receives subpoenas every month or two for information that can help identify reviewers, who believe they are posting anonymously. …

Several years ago, a physician reputation management service called Medical Justice developed a sort of liability vaccine. Doctors would ask patients to sign an agreement promising not to post about the doctor online; in exchange, patients would get additional privacy protections…. Medical Justice has now turned 180 degrees and embraced the review sites. It helpfully supplies its client doctors with iPads that they can give to patients as they are leaving. Patients write a review, and Medical Justice makes sure that the comments are posted on a review site. Sound coercive? … p

Patients may be steering clear for a far more ordinary reason: if they live in a small town or are only one or two degrees of social separation from physicians or their family members, they may not want to create any awkwardness. … An Angie’s List customer who read my column about the service last week raised a related concern. She said she would never talk negatively about her doctors on the site because there were only two decent hospital systems where she lived and she didn’t want to end up blackballed by doctors at either. …

Others idolize their doctors … Insurance giant WellPoint, … has found that only roughly 20 percent of customers will switch to a generic drug or use a less expensive imaging center, even if there is no health risk. Why? Because their doctor told them so. It is exactly this sort of unquestioning mind-set that may cause such low participation (or disproportionately positive reviews) at many review sites. …

WellPoint tracks doctors’ communication skills, availability, office environment and trust, but it doesn’t yet provide information about medical outcomes. .. It pays many physicians more when they achieve better results. But it’s not ready to share all of its outcome data. .. “The unintended consequences would be if certain surgical specialists would not take on the most challenging, needy and difficult patients.” … the big health care law requires Medicare to share all sorts of such data about doctors starting Jan. 1, 2013, assuming legal challenges don’t get in the way. The A.M.A. has raised many concerns about “risk adjustments.” (more; HT Tyler)

Risk adjustment is an issue for most products, since most have variations in who uses them. Yet we let people rate other products and collect track records on experiences with them. But for docs, we allow risk adjustment as an excuse to avoid accountability. This is an old issue is health econ — the story has always been that of course giving consumers info is a good idea, but we’d have to wait to give patients info until we “solve” the risk adjustment problem, which never happens, and never will. Mark my words, we will long delay publication of doc track records.