Another Form to Fill Out
How do you, as HIM professionals, shop for doctors? Being in the health care field, HIM professionals have a unique view of how they should be treated as patients and the care they can expect to receive. Jacque Taylor, AHDI-F, one of our
Top 10 in HIM, told her story of how she shopped for a new family doc in my interview with her. You can listen to the excerpt
here. Basically, Taylor, a medical transcription educator, said the doctor she ultimately chose was the only one who allowed her to meet his MT.
Many patients might not be that savvy. With many Web sites popping up to rate doctors, patients can go online and review their physicians much the same way they'd review that new Nicholas Sparks book they just garnered on Amazon.com. Likewise, patients seeking out a new doc might turn to those sites and those reviews to get a feel for how the doctor treats his or her patients--medically and personally.
Some of those sites, however, might be getting a bit of a behind-the-scenes makeover, according to an Associated Press article. In some doctors' offices, patients sign waivers that prevent them from posting reviews online. Neurosurgeon Jeffrey Segal started Medical Justice, which provides physicians with a waiver they can have patients sign that says the patient will not review the doctor on the Internet. An attorney questioned for the AP article said he wasn't sure the waivers would hold up in court, but still, the waivers might be enough to dissuade patients from reviewing their doctors online. Nearly 2,000 doctors use the waivers from Medical Justice.
While the reviews on the sites, like most things on the Internet (hello Wikipedia!) should be taken with a dose of caution, they might at times also give a peek into how well or how poorly a physician is doing. Would you go to a physician for the first time if you saw a review that called him or her "the worst doctor very high strung never on time not caring" (sic), as someone referred to one of my hometown docs on RateMDs.com?
And then there's the waiver issue. On a first visit to a doctor, patients are already presented with a mile-high stack of papers to fill out. What would your reaction be if you were presented with this type of a waiver at your next medical appointment? Do the waivers impinge on a patient's right to free speech or are physicians simply trying to protect themselves from the one crotchety patient who catches them on a bad day and has a high-speed Internet connection and a penchant for flaming?