In a study of 752 orthopedic patients by Curry et al., 18%–26% of new patients used a physician review website before their consultation. 8 Despite no correlation to patient outcome or physician performance, patients are influenced by nonregulated review sites. 8 Among a cohort of patients seeking a care provider who utilize online review sites, 35% chose a physician based on “good” ratings and 37% avoided a physician based on “bad” ratings. A rapidly increasing method of identifying and evaluating healthcare providers is the use of online physician review websites. Similarly, physicians are more aware of the importance of reputation and marketing to advertise their services.
13 Identification and optimization of variables that promote patient satisfaction continue to increase in importance. R ecent trends in medicine have shown a movement toward a physician reimbursement system that is focused on quality over quantity of service. Overall ratings from all 3 websites correlated significantly with each other, indicating agreement between physician ratings across different platforms. Longer wait times were significantly associated with a lower overall rating on Healthgrades (p < 0.0001). Neurosurgeons had higher overall ratings on Vitals (p = 0.04). In multivariable analysis, increasing surgeon age was significantly associated with a lower overall rating across all 3 review sites (p < 0.05). Social media presence was not significantly associated with overall ratings across all 3 sites, but it did significantly correlate with more comments on Healthgrades. Nearly all spine surgeons had a personal or institutional website (90.3%), and at least 1 accessible social media account was recorded for 43.5% of the spine surgeons in our study cohort (39.5% Facebook, 10.4% Twitter, 2.7% Instagram).
Physicians with either a personal or institutional website had a higher overall rating on Healthgrades compared to those who did not have a website (p < 0.01).
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