Angie's List will track doctors, health care
Monday, March 24, 2008
By Daniel Lee; Indianapolis Star
Monday, March 24, 2008
Doctors, hospitals and insurers now are facing the same sort of consumer scrutiny as plumbers and handymen.
In the latest sign that consumerism is becoming a major force in the health-care industry, Indianapolis-based Angie’s List today unveiled a new service that allows its members to rate physicians, dentists, pharmacies and health insurers. Doctors and hospitals, though, are expressing concerns.
Angie’s List — which has 600,000 members nationwide, including 43,300 in the Indianapolis area — built its business by providing a forum for its customers to rate painters, roofers and other service providers. Now, the company allows members to log on to angieslist.com to share their real-life experiences with local doctors, from the cleanliness of waiting rooms to the physician’s bedside manner.
Angie’s List is hardly alone in jumping into the growing health-care ratings service business. HealthGrades (healthgrades.com), RateMDs (ratemds.com), and Revolution Health Group (revolutionhealth.com), founded by former AOL Chief Executive Steve Case, also provide ratings information on health-care providers.
Indianapolis-based health insurer WellPoint is working with Zagat Survey — famous for its restaurant guidebooks — to allow its policyholders to evaluate their physicians employing the same methods used to rate eateries and travel destinations.
Doctors say the service to patients can’t be compared to the service of a skilled tradesman.
“The rating system is going to look at the experience the patient has, or had, at the appointment,” said Dr. Jon Marhenke, president of the Indiana State Medical Association. “It’s not going to rate the quality of the medical care that was provided. … They may see a wonderful office and very courteous people, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they received good care.”
Members of Angie’s List may rate service provided in 55 categories of health care, including dentistry, hospitals, insurance providers and a wide array of medical specialties such as orthopedics, obstetrics and gynecology. In pediatrics alone, members may choose health-care providers in 14 categories, including doctors focused on primary care, cardiology and optometry.
The health-care ratings will use a structure similar to the company’s other category ratings, according to Angie’s List. Members may assign an “A” to “F” grade for each component. Among the areas covered in the ratings:
> Was the office staff helpful and courteous?
> Did the physician explain things in a way that you could understand?
> Did you feel you could make your concerns understood to the physician?
“This came out of demand from our members,” said Angie’s List founder Angie Hicks. She said that 76 percent of Angie’s List members polled said they wanted to be able to rate health-care services.
“People are looking for a doctor that they can easily talk to and be open with. The key to a patient-doctor relationship is being able to communicate easily with them,” she said.
Hicks sees health care potentially becoming a big growth area for Angie’s List, with pediatrics an especially big draw as patients search for doctors for their kids. Angie’s List costs $59 a year, with a $15 sign-up fee.
“It’s a great extension of the consumer movement and more evidence of that in health care,” said Linda Heitzman, director of the life science and health practice at Deloitte Consulting. “We’re really making the shift from ‘patient’ to ‘consumer.’.”
But Marhenke said what goes into practicing effective medicine is complex — an art as well as a science — and this approach tends to compare it to a routine task such as installing a new sump pump.
Other health-care providers also expressed concerns.
“We have a high level of respect for Angie’s List being a resource for consumers,” said Johnny Smith, spokesman for Indianapolis-based hospital system St. Vincent Health. But he said his organization also has questions whether such a rating system for health-care providers would provide credible recommendations that would be useful to consumers.
“We base ourselves on quality and safety measures,” Smith added.
WellPoint, which operates Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, sees such rating services as a complement to data on health-care costs and quality, said company spokeswoman Jill Becher. She noted WellPoint initiatives such as its Anthem Care Comparison tool, which allows members to research price ranges of common services at hospitals.
Hicks, however, said Angie’s List health care ratings are designed to rate overall experience, not to replace official records such as a doctor’s status with the state medical board.
“Consumers are smart about the health care they’re receiving,” Hicks said. “They understand whether they had to go back to the doctor three times to figure what a correct diagnosis was, or if they go to a second doctor and the first doctor had missed something.”