When the new digital camera you just bought fails, you can leave a comment on its Amazon.com page to warn would-be buyers. When that new restaurant down the street messed up your steak twice (!), you can write your own review on Yelp.com. When a big box company gives you poor service, you can tip off Consumerist.com.
Social media has created a whole cadre of user-generated rating, commenting — and well…bitching — Web sites devoted to crowd-sourcing feedback for education, enlightenment and just plain feeling better about a bad experience.
However, these sites also provide valuable, consumer driven data that becomes extremely useful when you need to get past the praiseful advertising and want to know the pros/cons of an action — whether its buying a car, investing in a start-up, hiring a new employee or chosing a community to live. The advertising is all praise, you know.
Only user testimonials can give you the complete picture. And social media is all about the “social.”
Rate Your Doctor
But what if it was your doctor you are rating? Sites like RateMDs.com, HealthGrades.com and PhysicianReports.com give users the opportunity to weigh in on their medical experience or research a doctor before they book their next appointment.
But an advocacy group has set out to prevent you from rating your doctor online before you’ve even left the waiting room.
Medical Justice, an organization devoted to medical malpractice lawsuit prevention, has developed a privacy agreement whereby the patient agrees not to post about their doctor on the Web without the doctor’s permission.
Their argument is two-fold. First, some patients don’t realize the doctor is just one part of the medical experience. You may never even meet your doctor during routine procedures.
Second, there is no check and balance to the claims being made on these sites, and due to privacy laws, doctors are not legally allowed to refute misinformation.
Some Doctors Are Actually Jerks
This weekend NPR’s “On the Media” interviewed Jeffrey Segal, a former neurosurgeon and founder of Medical Justice, who says:
“We have no problem with a patient saying a doctor is a jerk. If there are 50 patients that say the doctor is a jerk, pretty good odds the doctor is a jerk. Where we struggle is when people start defining quality of care, something that is a little bit different than grading plumbing or roofing.
On occasion, someone feels as if they’ve been treated badly because of bad customer service, for lack of a better word, and other times they feel as they’ve been treated badly because of their perception the quality of care was poor. Now, these sites conflate those two into one.”
I have to give Medical Justice credit for acknowledging that the Web and social rating culture are building in popularity and can’t be stopped. I also give them props for saying they are free speech advocates and simply want to “pause” the current rating sites until a better system comes into place.
What I question is that a better system can exist that is not built on the current sites’ culture of free, transparent and open to subjective interpretation. Much of the medical community is hindered by outdated privacy policies uncomprehendable by a wired Web of users who give their birthdates away online to anyone who asks. 
It’s a free and open world these days. Scary, but true.
“Paging Dr. Future….”
So is the future to litigate and hope to pause, or embrace and blaze a trail? I guess we’ll see.