Rating of doctors Restaurant Style

The New York times reported that a commercial insurer has asked a well known restaurant rater Zagat in the US to poll patients covered under the plan inorder to rate their doctors on various dimensions of care and service.

Not surprisingly, doctors have given the proposal low marks because they claim that patients are poor judge of good quality medical care. Hence, rating them, the way restaurants are rated would serve to mislead more than to inform.

Surely, if an appropriate spectrum of dimensions of care and service are included in the rating, trends will emerge that patients would be able to use to select "good doctors".

My sense is that a good doctor cannot be consistently rated low if he manages patient humanely (ie seeing the person in the patient), shows care and concern, is knowledgeable and diagnoses and produces good clinical outcome for patients. Sure, there will be some ups and downs but where there are broad consensus across dimensions, chances are these ratings will separate the excellent, good doctors from the mediocre. When done appropriately (i.e. methodology, sampling...), such ratings will be similar to the customer satisfaction surveys that we have come to expect.

Such ratings when used in conjunction with quality indicators and costs information would be even more helpful to the patient.

Can we see this happening in Singapore healthcare scene? My sense is that at the right time, such ratings may be inevitable.