Abstract

Importance:Online ratings are a growing part of social media in healthcare and will have an increasing impact on how patients choose healthcare providers in the years to come.

Objective:To explore the correlation between Medicare patient volume and online reviews for retinal physicians.

Design:Database case series of Medicare patient exams by Ohio retinal physicians in 2016.

Setting:Databases from the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the American Society of Retinal Specialists, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Participants:Medicare patients who had retinal exams in Ohio in the year 2016.
Interventions: None. The number of Medicare patient exams was correlated with online ratings (Google.com, Vitals.com, Healthgrades.com, and Yelp.com )

Main Outcome Measures:Correlations of number of exams with number of online ratings and with average rating

Results:For the total number of ratings (average 30, median 16) vs. total Medicare exams per physician (average 1436, median 1454), there was a positive and close to significant correlation (Spearman rank correlation of 0.190; p=0.08). The average ratio of an exam resulting in a ranking was approximately 2% (30/1436). The cumulative average online rating (1 to 5 stars) per retinal physician in Ohio seemed to be unrelated to the number of patients examined (Spearman rank correlation of -0.017, p=0.874), although for Google and Yelp, there were significant Spearman rank correlations of about 0.3, P=.041 and .048 respectively.

Conclusion:The cumulative number of exams positively correlated with the number of online ratings. The cumulative average rating for retinal MDs in Ohio seemed to be unrelated to the number of patients examined, although for there were significant correlations for Google and Yelp ratings, suggesting that different rating systems may have different characteristics.

Keywords:Correlation of Medicare Patient Volume and Online Ratings for Retinal Physicians; Online Ratings; Medicare Patient Volume; Vitals; Healthgrades; Social Media; Retina Specialists in Ohio; Online Review

References

1. Social media “likes” healthcare: from marketing to social business (2018).
2. https://wainscotmedia.com/blog/5-surprising-statistics-about-online-doctor-reviews
3. https://www.grouponehealthsource.com/blog/10-most-popular-physician-rating-and-review-sites
4. https://opmed.doximity.com/articles/what-online-branding-means-for-retina-specialists-and-all physicians
5. Daskivich T., et al. “Differences in online consumer ratings of health care providers across medical, surgical, and allied health specialties: observational study of 212,933 providers”. Journal of Medical Internet Research 20 (2018): e176.

Citation

Citation: Alexander G Miller., et al. “Correlation of Medicare Patient Volume and Online Ratings for Retinal Physicians”.Acta Scientific Ophthalmology 4.1 (2020): 19-21.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Alexander G Miller., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.