Can We Trust Online Physician Ratings? Evidence from Cardiac Surgeons in Florida

Susan Lu () and Huaxia Rui ()
Additional contact information
Susan Lu: Purdue University, West Lafayette, Illinois 47907
Huaxia Rui: University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627

No 14-01, Working Papers from NET Institute

Abstract: Despite heated debate about the pros and cons of online physician ratings, very little systematic work examines the correlation between physicians’ online ratings and their actual medical performance. Using patients’ ratings of physicians at RateMDs.com and the Florida Hospital Discharge data, we investigate whether online ratings reflect physicians’ medical performance by means of a two-stage model that takes into account patients’ ratings-based selection of cardiac surgeons. Estimation results show that five-star surgeons are associated with significantly lower mortality rates and are more likely to be selected by sicker patients compared with lower-rated surgeons. In contrast, not accounting for patients’ rating-based selection leads to the opposite outcome: patients treated by five-star surgeons had higher mortality rates than patients treated by surgeons rated below five stars. Further, we find that patients are not naïve: they know how to use different dimensions of online rating information when choosing a surgeon. Our findings suggest that we can trust online physician ratings, at least of cardiac surgeons.

Keywords: word of mouth; physician ratings; patient selection; quality disclosure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 L15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-hea and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.netinst.org/Lu_Rui_14-01.pdf (application/pdf)
no

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:net:wpaper:1401

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from NET Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nicholas Economides ().