Finding a doctor can be a challenging process. Evaluate the knowledge and competence of the doctor, and how easy it is to get a very difficult promise before you see a doctor. Finding a doctor on your insurance network adds a level of complexity in the process.
People traditionally find doctors by using references from a friend, telephone book, online directory, or references from other doctors. All these methods suffer from deficiencies. The phonebook and online directory will give you the name and contact information for the doctor but they will not tell you about their competence, bed, waiting time, or other subjective information. The “Top doctor’s” ad website is equally unhelpful. Most often, these sites charge doctors’ fees to be included and paying this fee are the only criteria that make doctors registered as “Top Doctors.” In addition, these sites usually forward user e-mail addresses and other confidential information to the doctor when the user requests more information, meaning that users still receive unquirified communication a few months after choosing another doctor.
References from friends are undoubtedly the best way to find the right doctor. However, most friends will only be able to refer one or maybe two doctors. These doctors may not be on your network or their office may be too far from where you live or work. Most importantly, getting reviews and recommendations from a number of other patients will be more useful than just getting one reference. Request a reference from 10 friends at the same time will resolve this deficiency but is usually impractical.
The solution to this shortcoming is to use online reviews that includes a large database database and provides impartial reviews. Ideally, this service must allow users to contact a doctor without disclosing their secret contact information to the doctor, allowing users to distinguish reviews written by their friends from reviews written by other users, and allow users to ask any other questions about the reviews, and allow A user asks everyone on his network to be reviewed. What is important, when users are ready to write reviews he must be able to control who see the review text and who sees his identity, ensuring that he feels comfortable sharing information as much as possible.
