As listeners of NPR are painfully aware, Angie’s List is now providing a forum for rating and ranking doctors. There’s certainly a plethora of doctor rating companies, including Health Grades, DrScore.com and others. I’m not clear what Angie’s List value proposition for their service is, but they’ll face strong competition from other companies in the same.
But that’s not all. Angie’s List is now squarely in the sights of anti-patient advocates, like Dr. Jeffrey Segal and his company, Medical Justice. I’ve talked about this before in
Physician Takes Aim at First Amendment and also
Ranking Your Doctor.
Dr. Segal started the company when he was sued for medical malpractice. It’s not clear in anyone’s mind how you get from being sued for malpractice to trying to get patients to sign gag orders not to talk about your bedside manner. About 1,000 doctors subscribe to his service – mostly plastic surgeons, but also a strong cadre of physicians with nearly mail-order diplomas from “medical schools” in the Caribbean. Segal himself is no longer a practicing neurosurgeon and it is unclear if he has chosen not to practice or if he is not able to practice because of some other reason. Segal himself hasn’t been exactly been clear on this issue in previous media interviews.
If you’re a patient and your physician presents you with one of these gag orders, you should probably look for another physician. Given the kind of physicians that are drawn to this company, do you really want to have them as your physician?
Physician rating sites need to be taken with a grain of sale just like restaurant reviews, hotel reviews and nearly every other kind of third-party information. But trying to shut them down is futile. Truth will always come out, despite the best efforts of paranoid individuals.
But that’s not all. Angie’s List is now squarely in the sights of anti-patient advocates, like Dr. Jeffrey Segal and his company, Medical Justice. I’ve talked about this before in Physician Takes Aim at First Amendment and also Ranking Your Doctor.
Dr. Segal started the company when he was sued for medical malpractice. It’s not clear in anyone’s mind how you get from being sued for malpractice to trying to get patients to sign gag orders not to talk about your bedside manner. About 1,000 doctors subscribe to his service – mostly plastic surgeons, but also a strong cadre of physicians with nearly mail-order diplomas from “medical schools” in the Caribbean. Segal himself is no longer a practicing neurosurgeon and it is unclear if he has chosen not to practice or if he is not able to practice because of some other reason. Segal himself hasn’t been exactly been clear on this issue in previous media interviews.
If you’re a patient and your physician presents you with one of these gag orders, you should probably look for another physician. Given the kind of physicians that are drawn to this company, do you really want to have them as your physician?
Physician rating sites need to be taken with a grain of sale just like restaurant reviews, hotel reviews and nearly every other kind of third-party information. But trying to shut them down is futile. Truth will always come out, despite the best efforts of paranoid individuals.