Differences in online consumer ratings of health care providers across medical, surgical, and allied health specialties: Observational study of 212,933 providers

Abstract

Background: Health care consumers are increasingly using online ratings to select providers, but differences in the distribution of scores across specialties and skew of the data have the potential to mislead consumers about the interpretation of ratings. Objective: The objective of our study was to determine whether distributions of consumer ratings differ across specialties and to provide specialty-specific data to assist consumers and clinicians in interpreting ratings. Methods: We sampled 212,933 health care providers rated on the Healthgrades consumer ratings website, representing 29 medical specialties (n=128,678), 15 surgical specialties (n=72,531), and 6 allied health (nonmedical, nonnursing) professions (n=11,724) in the United States. We created boxplots depicting distributions and tested the normality of overall patient satisfaction scores. We then determined the specialty-specific percentile rank for scores across groupings of specialties and individual specialties. Results: Allied health providers had higher median overall satisfaction scores (4.5, interquartile range [IQR] 4.0-5.0) than physicians in medical specialties (4.0, IQR 3.3-4.5) and surgical specialties (4.2, IQR 3.6-4.6, P