Do evaluation metrics tell the entire story when rating spine surgeons?
By Admin | September 07, 2016
If you’re looking for a great restaurant, you may go to Yelp and read customer ratings. This model works wonders for food, hotels, and businesses, but the same model is being adopted to evaluate doctors and surgeons, and many are wondering if it tells the entire story.
In order to better assess the ratings mechanics, Becker’s Spine Review conducted a poll on Spine-health.com, the top-ranking and largest Musculoskeletal health website in the world, asking consumers and patients what they consider to be the most important factors in selecting a spine surgeon.
Some of the results were surprising, like patients don’t really care about physician referrals, for example. Here are the top ranked responses to the question: If you are considering spine surgery, which things do you care about most in choosing your surgeon?
- Desire to know percentage of favorable surgical outcomes (18.3%)
- Surgeon’s ability to explain medical condition, symptoms, surgical, and non-surgical treatment options (17.7%)
- Surgeon’s perceived trustworthiness (13.5%)
- Whether or not a surgeon puts a long-term treatment/pain management plan into place (12.5%)
- A surgeon’s amount of compassion and sensitivity (9.0%)
To read more about the results of the survey, read “Do you know what patients really care about when choosing a spine surgeon?” from Becker’s Spine Review.
