Insurers' online forums invite patients to vent

Nice to hear that the good outweighs the bad here 4 to 1...but who runs this thing...Blue Cross...hmmmm....there's already Zagat rating physicians too...Zagat for those who are not aware also rates restaurants...strange that restaurants and physicians fall in to the same type of rating game...I don't care much about Zagat ratings anyway and go to where folks tell me the food is good...same for physicians...but what really sucks about this entire site is the inability of the physician to respond! What if the physician wanted to say thank you for the positive reviews? Now what's up with that! Patients can be anonymous...so again, I ask what's up with this? Blue Cross will mail the physician a copy of the comments made...right now it's good that comments are mostly positive.

ONE MORE QUESTION HERE....DON'T WE HAVE BLOGS FOR THIS TOO? Not sure what the purpose of this site is yet...Consumer ratings should not affect payment, but one thing that is almost certain here is that they have some information to add to the data base regarding the clinic and/or physician discussed...something to think about...BD

Physicians already have battled insurers over the quality of data used in creating physician ratings and tiered health plans. Now organized medicine is feeling uncomfortable about insurers moving into the realm of gathering and disseminating unfettered patient feedback.
"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," said Edward L. Langston, MD, chair of the AMA Board of Trustees and a family physician in Lafayette, Ind.
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. Consumer Aware is a Minnesota-based, for-profit, wholly owned subsidiary of Aware Integrated, Inc., the non-profit holding company of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. Consumer Aware is dedicated to providing easy-to-use and useful health information tools through Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans for today's healthcare consumers.