Can We Trust Online Physician Ratings? Evidence from Cardiac Surgeons in Florida

Despite heated debate about the pros and cons of online physician ratings, little systematic work has examined the correlation between physicians’ online ratings and their actual medical quality. Using the ratings of cardiac surgeons at RateMDs and the patient outcomes of coronary artery bypass graft surgeries in the 2013 Florida Hospital Inpatient Discharge Data, we investigate whether online ratings are informative about physicians’ medical quality. To account for potentially nonrandom matchings of patients of different severity levels to surgeons of different rating categories, we focus on patients who arrived through the emergency department and explicitly consider how observed and unobserved patient health conditions jointly affect the matching arrangements and surgical outcomes. Both reduced form and two-stage estimation results show that, compared with surgeons rated four stars or higher, or those without rating information, lower rated surgeons are associated with significantly higher in-hospital mortality rates. Our findings suggest that online physician ratings could be a valuable information source for patients to learn about physician quality, at least for cardiac surgeons, a specialty for which treatment outcomes are relatively observable to patients and their family members.