Patients often turn to online reviews before selecting a healthcare provider. Poor reviews could negatively impact perceptions of potential new patients. In this study, researchers from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, evaluated whether the distribution of consumers ratings differ across medical specialties.

“While consumers may assume that higher scores indicate above-average performance, this may not be so if ratings are not normally distributed,” wrote first author Timothy Daskivich, PSHPM, MD, and colleagues. In fact, the percentile rank for a given star rating may differ drastically based on how scores are distributed, such that a seemingly high score may indicate average or even below-average performance.

“Furthermore, it is possible that distributions of scores may differ by specialty due to the varying perceptions of performance associated with patients’ specific needs and the services provided by different specialties.”

The study included 212,933 ratings of healthcare providers from the Healthgrades website. The ratings spanned 29 medical specialties, 15 surgical specialties and six allied health professions. Results showed overall satisfaction ratings were higher for allied health professionals than medical or surgical providers. Overall satisfaction ratings were highly skewed positively. This lead to only 23 percent of allied health providers receiving a rating of less than four out of five, followed by 37 percent of surgical and 50 percent of medical providers.

“Online consumer ratings of health care providers are highly left skewed, fall within narrow ranges, and differ by specialty, which precludes meaningful interpretation by health care consumers,” concluded Daskivich and colleagues. “As a result, scores that appear high might actually be in the lowest quartile of scores, effectively misleading patients about perceived quality or experience of care. Specialty-specific percentile ranks may help consumers to more meaningfully assess online physician ratings.”