I spent some of the morning running almost random searches to try and remember the name of my doctor. Eventually, I got him. And a bunch of reviews of him. Most of the reviews, to be sure, were good. The consensus appears to be that he's sort of mean to you, but quite thorough. But that's all the reviewers were able to evaluate: Was he courteous? And did he do lots of stuff? Those are not particularly useful metrics on which to evaluate doctor quality. Etiquette is important, but neither here nor there to diagnosing appendicitis. And "doing stuff" can actually be bad, and needlessly costly. The question is whether the doctor is doing the right stuff. But patients simply don't have the requisite tools to evaluate that question. They can't review doctors like they can review books, or movies, because impressions of the experience aren't terribly relevant, or insofar as they are relevant, they're a second-order concern. There have been some efforts to get insurers to rate doctors, but their incentive, of course, is to rate doctors highly when they're being stingy, and helping the insurer make profits. There are a host of other ideas for rating doctors floating around, but most of them are bedeviled by similar problems. And that's why I'm fairly pessimistic about attempts to heal our medical system by giving the consumer information and power. The doctor-patient relationship is necessarily private, so you're not going to have third-party observers (nor should you), and it's founded on a massive information asymmetry (otherwise, the patient wouldn't be there), neither of which lend themselves to an accurate and reliable consumer information system.
