Doctor Review Websites: Meeting Your Medical Match

Looking for a new doctor can be an exhausting and time-consuming proposition, much like hiring any professional to work on your home or care for your pets. However, unlike a pet sitter, gardener, or electrician, choosing a health care provider is comparable to choosing someone with whom you’ll have a long-term relationship. It’s imperative to not only make sure that the physician you choose is skilled, well-educated, and a reputable member of his field, it’s also important that you find someone you’re able to trust implicitly, a tall order when you’re considering a perfect stranger. Before you commit to a new doctor, review all the information you have at your disposal After all, it’s fairly common to choose one physician, and rely on that person throughout the course of life.

The internet has helped to change the way that Americans go about finding doctors, although the system is far from foolproof, and many of the new advances in information distribution are still in the early stages of developments. In recent years, Medicare has been hard at work on developing a physician quality reporting initiative, seeing the need for a way for prospective patients to get the information they need from a trusted authority. Though that is still in development, private websites dedicated to providing reviews of doctors and medical practices are springing up across the internet. The issue of whether these websites provide positive feedback and reinforcement for doctors, or whether they can be used to negatively impact a doctor’s practice or even gain patient information if accessed by hackers is still a frequently debated one. For now, however, the system is providing more positives than negatives, and doctor review websites are becoming a leading source for finding a new physician.

Of course, a favorable doctor review is only one aspect in choosing a physician. Much like receiving a positive recommendation from a friend, a positive review is often enough to pique curiosity and inspire someone to pick up the phone and schedule an appointment. Choosing a new healthcare provider is largely a personal experience, and an interview will often be the only way you can tell which doctor is the right one for you, and which you ultimately feel the most comfortable with. Taking the time to schedule interviews with potential candidates allows you the opportunity to ask relevant questions, express concerns, and get a feel for a physician’s personality and way of interacting with patients, things that can only be suggested through online reviews.