BACKGROUND Physician rating websites (PRWs) have been developed to allow all patients to rate, comment, and discuss physicians' quality online as a source of information for others searching for a physician. At the beginning of 2010, a sample of 298 randomly selected physicians from the physician associations in Hamburg and Thuringia were searched for on 6 German PRWs to examine the frequency o...

BACKGROUND The correspondence of satisfaction ratings between physicians and patients can be assessed on different dimensions. One may examine whether they differ between the two groups or focus on measures of association or agreement. The aim of our study was to evaluate methodological difficulties in calculating the correspondence between patient and physician satisfaction ratings and to show...

The internet has fostered widespread information transparency and a rapid rise in consumer-generated ratings. While these ratings, in the form of digital word-of-mouth, provide a potentially useful source of information to guide consumer decision making, they may be subject to bias. Notably controversial are online consumer ratings in healthcare services, where the consequences of poor informat...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE The US public is increasingly using online rating sites to make decisions about a variety of consumer goods and services, including physicians. We sought to understand, within the context of other types of rating sites, parents' awareness, perceptions, and use of physician-rating sites for choosing primary care physicians for their children. METHODS This cross-section...

BACKGROUND Physician-rating websites (PRWs) may lead to quality improvements in case they enable and establish a peer-to-peer communication between patients and physicians. Yet, we know little about whether and how physicians respond on the Web to patient ratings. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to describe trends in physicians' Web-based responses to patient ratings over time, to i...