Response to Letter to the Editor regarding “Online physician ratings fail to predict actual performance on measures of quality, value, and peer review”

We thank Dr Bardach for her critical review of our paper evaluating the relationship between online ratings and objective measures of physician quality, value, and peer review. Her principal argument is that quality and value of care are opaque to consumers and therefore not reflected in online ratings of physicians. Indeed, this is the very crux of our paper ’s message. Dr Bardach details the ways in which our chosen metrics for quality and value of care – Choosing Wisely measures, cost of care, length of stay, and peer review – are outside of the scope of the patient experience and therefore unlikely to be captured by online consumer ratings. How ever, their imperceptibility is not an idiosyncrasy of our metrics; rather, these metrics exemplify a broad range of widely accepted measures of quality and value of care. In fact, all measures of quality and value of care are difficult for patients to discern. For example, regarding quality of care , whether or not a physician hews to specialty guidelines – regardless of whether it was unnecessary care omitted or necessary care delivered – would not be expected to be discernable by a patient. Similarly, it is difficult for patients to know whether out-of-pocket costs for a given episode of care are reasonable without an established reference for what that episode usually costs. It is because these elements of care are not reliably captured in online ratings that we proposed in our article that they “should be paired w...
Source: Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association - Category: Information Technology Source Type: research