By Allan Maurer
WINSTON SALEM, NC—Generally, the quality of care offered by U.S. doctors is very high judging by the results of patient ratings on DrScore.com, says founder Steve Feldman, M.D., a practicing dermatologist and professor at Wake Forest University’s medical school.

“I’m a 9.1 on a scale of 10 and that puts me solidly in the bottom half of physicians,” he says.

DrScore’s mission is to improve medical care by giving patients a forum for rating their physicians, and by giving doctors an affordable, objective, non-intrusive means of documenting the quality of care that they provide.

Feldman tells TechJournal South that he founded the site in 2005 to help people find and rate doctors and specialists. Just this week the site and a South Carolina Web developer released an iPhone app called “I need a Doctor,” to help people find physicians or specialists while traveling.

Weighing in on the current debate about the high cost of health care, Feldman says the problem is that the system relies on third-party payers (private or public insurance) rather than having individuals pay for their own care, which would create the competition that drives prices down.

“Eventually we’ll have to move back to a system where people pay directly for medical care,” he says. “When that day comes, we’ll see the same type of savings in medicine that we see now in the high tech world.”

For example, he notes that he recently put a relatively low cost 8 gigabyte chip in his digital camera, but years ago paid an extra $1,000 for 16 megabytes of RAM in a computer.

Making patients pay out of pocket for medical care would put incentives for savings back into the system, he maintains. He blogs about the idea on DrScore regularly.

He says some people question the idea of having patients rate their doctors, but says they know when they have a good experience.

“I go to Disney wolrd with my kids and I don’t know the first thing about how to make a roller coaster or about running a hotel. But I know if I had a good experience,” he says.
With the quality of medical care so high, what differentiates that experience for most patients?

The quality of service, says Feldman. But it means more to health care than just a patient’s comfort level.

Feldman conducted research on how patients use prescribed medicines and found that doctor satisfaction does affect how patients use their medicines.

“Therefore, it affects the outcomes of their treatment,” he says. “So even if all you care about is getting people well, patient satisfaction matters.”

Drscore, which has about 1,000 U.S. doctors signed up to use the site to rate their practices, helps the physicians obtain ongoing patient feedback, Feldman says.

The quick, interactive online rating service lets doctors survey every patient every time rather than doing more cumbersome surveys a few times a year, he says.

In a blog post he explains that “Our survey has to be convenient for patients, yet sufficiently detailed to give doctors the information they need to improve their practices.

“We achieved this using the interactive survey developed by patient satisfaction research scientist Dr. Roger Anderson. The survey also has to be scientifically valid. The proven validity of the DrScore survey allows us to use DrScore data for research publications to help all doctors improve their patients’ satisfaction.”

Online: www.drscore.com

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