The Impact of Online Physician Ratings on Patients' Choices

With the rising of Internet, more and more websites are providing review information on health care providers. Differing from the traditional report cards, these reviews and ratings are typically written by patients themselves. Therefore, these reviews are easier for patients to understand and also addresses more of patients concerns. An obvious trend in recent years is that a growing number of patients rely on the information from these review websites to choose health care providers. We exploit the physician ratings from Vitals.com, one of the largest and most comprehensive physician-review websites in US, and inpatient claims data of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgeries in Pennsylvania to examine the impact of online physician ratings on patients’ physician choices. Using a discrete choice model with random coefficients, we find that the probability that patients receive CABG surgery from high-rating surgeons is significantly higher than that from surgeons without ratings, and the probability that patients receive CABG surgery from low-rating surgeons is significantly lower than that from surgeons without ratings.