MINNEAPOLIS, January 21, 2008—Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota created a special site for patients last November to spout off on their experiences seeking care. Now an AMNews article features Minnesota physicians, including MMA President James J. Dehen Jr., M.D., expressing their thoughts about the experiment.
The Healthcare Scoop, created by BCBS, is a place where patients can talk openly about experiences with physicians and hospitals. Patients post pseudonymously, leaving comments, many of them critical, about their experiences with hospitals, clinics, and providers.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota sees the site as a way to learn what patients think about their care, good and bad. And it also porovides patients with a safety valve, a place to compare notes with others,giover credit where it's due, or to sound off about some frustration dealing with the system.
The site isn't limited to BCBS members. Anyone with an email address can post what the site calls a "health care story."
The 170 "stories" posted so far are a mix of positive and negative about physicians, nurses and experiences during procedures. One explains why "non-Christians" shouldn't go to a practice that "clearly ... is a faith-based clinic," the AMA report said.
Another praised an urgent-care clinic for "saving my life."
As of Jan. 15, 84 physicians and 75 clinics and hospitals had been named in comments. Positive comments outnumbered negatives at a 4-1 ratio.
The article did cite a pair of posts taking a negative tack. One poster identifying herself as "Not happy" complained about the wait at her dermatologist's office. Another, under the name of "Disgusted," observed that his doctor "refuses to communicate with patients." The AMA article said that some physicians are unhappy that BCBS is sponsoring the site.
"Physicians already have battled insurers over the quality of data used in creating physician ratings and tiered health plans," the article said. "Now organized medicine is feeling uncomfortable about insurers moving into the realm of gathering and disseminating unfettered patient feedback.
Physicians are accustomed to negative feedback, the article said, quoting James J. Dehen Jr., M.D., a general surgeon from Brainerd, Minn., who serves as president of the Minnesota Medical Association. Ideally, physicians want to hear this kind of thing first-hand, while they still have a chance to make things right.
Dehen told the reporter that the MMA hadn’t yet discussed the new site. But he said he was a little concerned about the potential harm it could do to doctors' practices, to have patients -- or possibly complete strangers -- bad-mouthing them anonymously onine.
"Once things get out on the Web, there's no bringing them back," Dehen said. "People always are going to use word of mouth, but Mrs. Jones getting mad about something and complaining at a tea party and then reconsidering, that is not the same as putting that on a World Wide Web
site."
Edward L. Langston, MD, chair of the AMA Board of Trustees and a family physician in Indiana, offered a similar observation. "While we encourage open patient communication with their physicians, we are concerned that the public reporting of results from anonymous, Web-based patient satisfaction surveys may be counterproductive," he said.
But most providers concede that all feedback, whether positive or negative, is "gold in the mine" -- valuable information that allows clinics and doctors to examine ways to deliver even better care.
Health plans that have offered feedback mechanisms promise they are not going to let loose talk affect reimbursement. But they – basically just BCBS and Wellpoint, at this stage – see value in making the medical system more transparent to patients.
Complete AMNews story