Investigating bias in the online physician reviews published on healthcare organizations' websites

摘要

Making healthcare decisions is often difficult, challenging, and consequential for individuals. To facilitate and inform provider selection decisions, healthcare organizations offer physician review services and publish the provided reviews on their websites. However, if such reviews are highly skewed, significantly inaccurate, and systematically biased, they could mislead patients. This is against healthcare organizations' responsibility of acting in the best interests of patients. To shed light on this phenomenon, this study examines two types of bias, namely between-website and within-website biases, in the online reviews of physicians posted on healthcare organizations' websites. Reviews belonging to 1921 physicians were collected from two data sources: (1) websites of the hospitals that the physicians were affiliated with and (2) four commercial physician rating websites including HealthGrades, RateMDs, Vitals, and Google Reviews. To test between-website biases, the ratings posted on the healthcare organizations' websites were compared against the corresponding ratings on the commercial websites. Our results suggest that the ratings provided by healthcare institutions are generally, more skewed toward scores favorable to physicians, and less dispersed, than corresponding ratings reported on commercial websites. The within-website results also supported the argument that physicians with different rating scores systematically receive different number of ratings and comments. Our findings highlight the fact that hospitals that publish physician ratings should try to identify and reduce rating biases to help patients make more informed and judicious clinical decisions, realizing the responsibility of healthcare providers in protecting patients' rights and safety.