Signal versus Noise

In a prior blog post, I referenced the balance between privacy and transparency in our quest to empower patients to make better decisions. The discussion around patient reviews seemed sufficiently complicated that I decided to address that separately. So, picking back up on the topic, the question is whether we would like to allow providers to hide certain reviews.

For us, there's actually not much of an issue if we knew that all reviews were true (and objective). If that were the case, the answer would essentially be the same answer to the question of whether or not to display something like disciplinary actions: yes, we can understand why providers might want that hidden, but no, we wouldn't want to hide that. The question becomes more complicated in light of allegations that have surfaced that people write false information in their reviews (whether that be one provider writing a false review for a competitor or whether that be an unhappy patient making up facts to strengthen his case).

It'd be interesting to read a study on the estimated number of patently false reviews (although, I'm sure that such a study would be expensive and difficult to pull together). Overall, patients very much look to see what other patient say -- for a while, that was the most requested feature. The sense that we got in talking with people is that patient reviews needed to be taken with a grain of salt, much as reviews for other products and services. While it might be easy to fake one or two reviews, it seems unlikely that someone would go through the trouble of creating ten different reviews for the same provider. Impossible? Nope. Improbable? We think so. And that brings us to our take on whether or not to show patient reviews: a few reviews is not a lot of signal, but the aggregation of many reviews that voice the same feedback over a long period of time is likely to mean something. Interestingly, someone just wrote in with the same opinion.

And for those who are curious, we try to offer something extra when people leave a review on our site. After typing in their feedback, we give users the opportunity to upload some documentation (e.g. an explanation of benefits form or a receipt) and request a verification. If everything checks out, we'll mark that review as a "Documented Encounter" -- it's a little like an online retailer saying that a review is from a "Verified Buyer" since they know the online identity of the individual and as well as his purchase history. Have thoughts on this topic? Let us know.