As it is, most doctors have no ratings. And those that do have only a handful of ratings. How meaningful are 5 or less ratings for a doctor? It’s not a random sampling that would be representative of the patient base. For patients to rate a doctor, it usually involves the extreme of satisfaction spectrum to motivate them to bother submitting a review – either awfully disappointed or overwhelmingly pleased.

Vitals.com needs to encourage visitors to post reviews by making its site user-friendly to visit in the first place. And that means not restricting the number of physician checks.

As to the significance of the ratings, I look more for verbal testimony than simply the numbers. With the verbal opinion, I can at least discern for myself how valid the rater opines and whether the rater was reasonable in his/her assessment.

With that said, I’ve checked out vitals.com and ratemds.com. For the most part, the excellent ratings/reviews of the doctors I know of parallel the good rep as surveyed in local publications involving peer opinion.

I liked this site so much I purchased membership to their top doctor database, also.

Good luck

Beth

but, in my examination of http://www.vitals.com I see that they DO have multiple email addresses and a direct telephone number for customer service readily available …

… and their explanation of DO as a medical practice is different than the one posted above, perhaps they revised it to a more appropriate definition.

“D.O. stands for Doctor of Osteopathy. Much like an MD, a DO is a licensed practicing doctor or surgeon. DOs attend Osteopathic medical schools that have a very similar curriculum as an allopathic (MD) medical school but with a more holistic approach to medicine.”

Some physicians have a DO (osteopathic) degree, which is similar to the MD (allopathic) degree but with a more holistic approach. Many doctors today are DO’s, especially in primary care. Yet that vitals.com website will list a doctor as NOT being board certified at all if their certification is from an osteopathic specialty board rather than a predominantly allopathic specialty board! This is contrary to the policies of almost all US hospitals.

Also, their website includes this somewhat bizarre statement:
“…So do you want an MD or a DO? DOs typically practice a more holistic form of medicine and usually believe in more natural treatments. MDs are more inclined to prescribe normal treatments and medications…”

It does not seem evenhanded to say that MD’s prescribe more “normal” treatments. It implies that osteopathic physicians are abnormal.

Another issue is that they rate doctors on purported quality ratings of previous medical schools and residency programs. But this is of questionable value, for this reason: Suppose Dr. Jones is flagged because the hospital he did his residency at had poor ratings in cardiac surgery and in orthopedics. But suppose he is a pediatrician, so what is the relevance of those other specialties to HIS background? Further, suppose he finished his residency in 1983. Of what relevance would 2008 hospital ratings be to his residency program from 1983, that is, 25 years ago!