TripAdvisor for fertility clinics.

TripAdvisor is a website that hosts mostly user generated reviews of hotels and so on of interest to tourists. Should patients seeking fertility treatment get something similar, based on others’ reviews, to help them choose a clinic? A public debate convened by the Progress Educational Trust at London’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in April considered this divisive issue. Lucy Richardson, a senior clinical embryologist and an audience member, voiced the concerns of many in recounting her experience of booking a weekend break to Italy with her TripAdvisor conversant mother: “If it’s not a five [star rating] for everything from location to sleep quality and cleanliness, she won’t consider it. But what does a star rating tell you? “What could such a crude measure, for example, tell you about the complex experience of undergoing fertility treatment?” User generated review websites are one of the decade’s dotcom success stories. They range from review and ratings sites (such as TripAdvisor), where users rate people or products, to review aggregators, which collect reviews from other sites and independently assign ratings based on these reviews (such as Rotten Tomatoes and FindTheBest.com). The user review model has already made inroads into UK healthcare. Sites that publish user reviews of private medical travel and cosmetic surgery (such as harleystreetguide.com and treatmentabroad.com) proliferate. And in 2007 NHS Choices (nhs.uk) broke new ground for a government website by introducing a facility for patients to comment on hospital services. To cover the full range of services, today NHSChoices publishes 400 000 ratings and moderated free text reviews, with 120 000 unique users reading them each week, a spokesperson told The BMJ. Not if but when?