Consuming professions: User-review websites and health services

Abstract

By the middle of the 20th century the medical profession had established itself as the archetypical profession. The relationship between doctor and patient was variously regarded as 'special', 'outside' or otherwise at a distance from other consumer experiences. Since then, the status of doctors has changed and information about health and illness has moved from the confines of the consulting room to the World Wide Web. This article considers the recent development of Web 2.0 resources that are constructed around user-generated content about identified health practitioners and services. Web sites where users can both read and write comments about health practitioners and services reflect the broader consumer content industry commonly associated with sites such as Amazon and TripAdvisor. In this article, user reviews about health care are contextualized along two dimensions: first, the relationship with differently oriented health care systems; and second, the engagement with Web 2.0 characteristics and challenges to established consumer information sources. Examples are provided from a number of user-review sites and the implications of their growing popularity are discussed. It is concluded that we are witnessing the beginning of a new phase of the doctor-consumer/patient relationship.