While visiting with a potential partner company that happened to be both an employer and healthcare system, I realized that they were emotionally trapped by the theory of "negative doctor reviews by patients lead to lost referrals."

Yes, there were sites like MDratings.com that tend to be clusters of individuals dealing with Anger Management [i jest]. There are also several other websites that mesh doctor and hospital reviews in with restaurants and retailers - such as Yelp.com (which i actually like and use).  Regardless of the site or the quality and depth of the reviewing/rating tools - one inalienable fact remains… Doctors and hospitals, in general, suck at dealing with negative reviews/ratings by patients.

The irony of this to me is that these patients/caregivers who are upset, angry or dissatisfied still exist regardless of whether there is a public forum on the internet to vent their case. In fact, these individuals actually leverage an even more insidious forum to express their poor experiences: around their office water cooler and over the backyard fence! Gasp!

Recognizing that most of the internet review sites lack the tools for the "reviewed" Provider to participate in the conversation about them in a constructive manner - so I wondered IF there was mechanism, would Providers actually and willingly participate?  Just like any other business or human experience, NOBODY is 100% satisfied . It’s just not a realistic expectation.

Upon accepting the notion that not every patient will have a perfect experience and then embracing and participating in a public dialog to acknowledge negative patient experiences, Providers will likely experience a social principal of “reciprocity” that is at the core of most social interaction online, especially things like customer reviews and recommendations. When people read patient reviews from other people, they feel like returning the favor and write reviews of their own.

I have become a fan of Joshua Porter who recently published a great book on social design and recently blogged the following :

I received a question from someone … who claimed to be skeptical of reviews…that in his mind he thought that people would go out of their way to write negative reviews but not positive ones. In other words, a site would get a disproportional amount of negative reviews, even if the general sentiment for the product was positive. … This is a typical example of the fear that I was talking about. It’s easy to imagine the damage done by people who write negative reviews. As someone else in the audience mentioned, they were afraid that if someone went to a site and saw a negative review first then they would leave and be lost forever.

But here are a few points to keep in mind.

1. Most of the time, negative reviews are genuine. Many products are bad. If someone truly has a negative experience with a product, they will write a review not just to get it off their chest, but because they actually want to help others avoid the same fate as they had. Most people write negative reviews to be helpful.
2. Negative reviews are an opportunity. If you treat negative reviews as input into your design process, then you can actually use them as research to improve your offering. This is a tough pill to swallow, however, as it’s not easy to admit shortcomings.
3. People seek out negative reviews. As someone in the audience mentioned, they almost always zero-in on the negative reviews. Why? Because they’re already interested in the product, they know the positive aspects of it. What they’re looking for are the negative aspects, that crucial information that the manufacturer or the site will never tell you. People know that products are never as good as they’re advertised to be, and seek out the balancing information so they can make a smart decision.
4. People write positive reviews to balance out the negative ones. This is often overlooked when people think about reviews, they imagine that negative reviews simply beget more negative reviews. But if a product has a bad rating and people have had an opposite experience with the product, they’ll be more likely to write a review to balance out the message. People vote for the underdog, and generally want others to know the truth.

In addition, there are several designers can do to make reviews more valuable.

• Good sites average reviews and show distribution. This dampens the ability for any single review to unfairly upset the pot. If people can clearly see that there are both positive and negative reviews for a product, they’ll be more likely to investigate and see why people are having such different experiences
• Let people rate the reviews. On Amazon you can rate the review, which helps to moderate rants and overly-biased negative reviews. This allows the site to display the reviews in helpfulness-order, which means that people see the most helpful (positive or negative) reviews first. This also helps to remove the worry that a single unfair review will upset the pot.

Here are two arguments for using product reviews, tailored to the situation:

For product managers: Negative reviews exist whether or not they’re published. By stopping them from being published, you’re not stopping negative sentiment, you’re just slowing down the spread of it. But in the long term, ignoring that negative sentiment will kill you just as thoroughly as if it were fast-acting. Why not embrace the speed of feedback to improve your offering?

…

In general, people are coming to expect customer reviews as part of the shopping process . If you don’t have them, then they’ll go … somewhere else to find them.