HealthGrades And Other MD Rating and Referral Sites List “Dead Doctors” on Their MD Information Pages And Even Include the Insurance Plans the “Dead Doctors” Honor

This just goes to show you can’t really believe every thing you read on the web. I came across this by accident when doing some searches relative to the Medical Quack. I went to an obgyn doctor for many years and was very happy with her and would still be a patient today except for the fact that she unfortunately passed away from breast cancer.

These sites are supposed to “rate and “help” people but I am not convinced how valuable they are when I see my former physician who has been dead for around 6 years still listed and according to the site, she takes HealthNet. You can read on the site about the focus on helping hospitals with marketing and other software and management areas of business. I guess they are too busy marketing to look for a little bit of accuracy here with the physicians they provide information for. Marketing captures all today. I did call her old phone number out of curiosity and it said it had been disconnected so goodness forbid that phone number being given out to anyone else here, they would kill the phone company with all the wrong numbers due to a listing as such.

Not too long ago we had a story in the news how the City of Buffalo paid over 2 million dollars worth of health insurance premiums on “dead employees” and I can’t believe there was no follow to see if these “dead employees” had their annual mammogram screenings, etc. and the premiums continued to be collected, so much for check and balances and now they may not be able to get the money back.

City of Buffalo Has Paid Over $2 Million to Provide Health Insurance for Hundreds of Dead People-Some as Many as 4 Years

It appears you can die and never make it out of some systems. Back on course here this is a haven for crooks who might be mining data too, so the danger in not updating is there.

Someone should think about investing in the Social Security Data base Death Index to cross reference as it only cost a few hundred dollars.

Within the last month or so a big Private Equity firm just bought these folks too so they might want to get some of these issues in order.

Health Grades Hospital/Provider Rating Service Purchased by Private Equity Firm

Subsidiary Watch – The private equity firm of Vestar has over 7 billion in assets and under management. There are several healthcare companies already included in their portfolio and the combination of information data bases and business structures could be right around the corner. We are seeing business models connecting industries and companies that in the past would have never worked together but the big change today is that they all have “data” to work with, exchange and query for business intelligence type decisions that will lead to bigger profits by using algorithms to calculate.

Now these folks of course are in the marketing business and recently on their page they listed all the press stories and again there are some big papers listed like Forbes, The LA Times, and more; how credible is all this information I ask and how often do they review it. How accurate is it for the hospitals they rate too I wonder?

Now after I finished with their page I checked out a few other sites and I am guessing they may make a few dollars on reselling their data base, either that or these other sites use the same old outdated data. Here’s some examples below on the same “dead doctor”. You can click on each image and go right to the page and perhaps these folks will clean up their act too. Outside of the data area, it’s just disrespectful as well to have this linger.

I left the best here for last as she’s listed on TrialsCentral.org too so perhaps she can come up out from the grave and participate with some clinical trials too.

Recently the company put out a list of the 10 deadliest hospitals, well maybe after this post we can look forward to the “mostly dead” doctors? (grin). I tried to see if I could find the “Do Not Pay List” yet and it’s not out yet from the government.

The Creation of a “Do Not Pay List” Announced by Government – Will Help Keep those MDs in the Grave from Cashing In

We do need that for cases like this where criminal minds can locate information to use for fraud.

Probe finds dead doctors used in Medicare Scam

The post below explains a bit about why fraud is not more actively pursued as there are very profitable transaction fees that make big money, Bravo was one HMO that made a billion in profit last year for an example and was projecting twice that amount for this year and was just bought by an insurance company.

Two Florida Business Men–Medicare Fraud For Billing for Penis Pumps for Female and Male Patients–Lot of Transaction Money Made And Who’s Running the Algorithms for Profit?

Again I am not a big fan of ratings but the pages can be useful when look for addresses and phone numbers. After seeing the lack of attention here on doctors I would hesitate myself to put a lot of stock into ratings and other information. I didn’t think of it but perhaps I should have looked for “dead hospitals” too.

When we live in the world of data, data and more data today and as consumers are always assumed that they have the correct data all the time, think again and don’t believe everything you read out there.

These dead doctors and deal patients of late certainly seem to be creating a lot of issues, they die in life but their data seems to live on forever.

I hope with this example I was able to open a few ears here and again be careful about what ratings you read as they could be skewed with fiduciary data, with that dead data offering less than what you might expect. BD

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