Online customer reviews and ratings are now the gold standard for judging the quality of many industries: They affect sales of books, movie tickets and hotel bookings. They are, unfortunately, becoming ubiquitous in the health care sector as well. Soon, you may find as many online reviews of your primary care physician as there are Yelp reviews of your local pizzeria. While it makes sense to check the reviews of a restaurant before eating there, online patient reviews should not be the basis of one's decision to choose a medical provider.

Customers are generally qualified and capable of evaluating services and products. At a restaurant, anybody can tell if the steak is too chewy, the atmosphere is not pleasant, or the waitress is rude. While people have different tastes and thus evaluate similar qualities differently, the overall ratings provided by a large enough sample of patrons give a fairly good sense of what is going on at that restaurant. Online reviews are valid measures of a restaurant's quality.



This is not the case for online patient reviews. Patients are neither qualified nor capable of evaluating the quality of the medical services that they receive. How can a patient, with no medical expertise, know that the treatment option that he received was the best available one? How can a patient's family who lost him on a hospital bed, know that physicians had provided their loved one with the best possible medical care? If patients are not qualified to make medical decisions and rely on physicians' medical expertise to make such decisions, then how can they evaluate the quality of such decisions and know that their doctor's decision was the best possible one?

Although a patient may also lack financial expertise and rely on a financial advisor to manage his stock portfolio, he can still judge the quality of financial advisors' recommendations by considering the growth in his stocks' value and compare it with the market's rate. In other words, there are baselines against which one can compare the outcomes of a financial advisor's decisions.

Patients have no such baseline to make similar comparisons. How can a patient know by how many years the treatment he received from a physician has increased or decreased his life expectancy?

