Healthgrades, a leading physician and hospital review website, has launched a new ratings system to help patients find information about individual physicians’ quality of care for specific procedures. This could be good or bad news for physicians – depending on the steps taken to take advantage of these new tools.
According to USA Today, Healthgrades analyzed 500 million medical insurance claims from federal and private sources of information about hundreds of diseases, conditions or procedures to create the ratings. Results can be filtered by procedure, location, treatment for specific treatments and diseases, and searches yield an “Experience Match” that gives users the best option available for what they are looking for. There are also ratings for hospitals based on friendliness, cleanliness and service.
So how can medical practices take advantage of this service? The new ratings give physicians who are qualified experts in their fields more authority online, and give patients a dependable way of judging who’s truly “the best.” This means that physicians may need to be more careful to manage their reputation. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, in the past few years, awareness of these review sites has gone from virtually zero to 65%, and 23% of the public uses the review sites.
In addition to helping our clients manage their reputation online, Medical Web Experts has a partnership with Healthgrades that allows us to help our clients take advantage of their profiles as a lead generation tool. Healthgrades’ new enhanced profile service gives doctors a new way to increase the number of visits to their profile and turn those visits into leads. Contact us online or call us at 1-866-932-9944 to learn more.
