Turn the tables on your doctors: Do a checkup on them before they conduct one on you. Armed with an Internet connection, you can make sure the medical professionals you’re seeing – or considering – are licensed, find out if they have board certification in their specialties, see quality ratings for the hospitals where they practice, get feedback from their patients and weigh in with your own opinions. It’s the wired-age version of asking everyone you know for recommendations. “There’s an ever-growing appetite for this information,” said Scott Shapiro, a spokesman for HealthGrades (healthgrades.com), a site with profiles and ratings of physicians as well as hospitals. The information is collected from a variety of sources, including the doctors themselves. “People are used to researching before making a big decision. … We get about 5 million individuals who come to the Web site each month.” It’s still easier to get the scoop on institutions than doctors. The Maryland Health Care Commission, for instance, produces quality reports on hospitals, HMOs and nursing homes but not physicians. “We don’t collect data that would allow us to get down to the level of the individual physician in terms of performance, and it would be very expensive to try,” said Dr. Rex Cowdry, executive director of the commission. But more and more sites are popping up with doctor details that can help you better compare candidates for the job of keeping you alive and well. Some of the information is objective and some of it is highly opinionated.
Please click on the link below to read the Baltimore Sun article:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/investing/bal-bz.ml.doctor04may04,0,2628707.story
For more information on defending medical malpractice and nursing home matters in Florida contact Howard Citron at The Citron Law Firm, P.A. – www.citronlegal.com.
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