Rate Your Physician: Findings from a Lithuanian Physician Rating Website

Physician review websites are known around the world. Patients review the subjectively experienced quality of medical services supplied to them and publish an overall rating on the Internet, where quantitative grades and qualitative texts come together. On the one hand, these new possibilities reduce the imbalance of power between health care providers and patients, but on the other hand, they can also damage the usually very intimate relationship between health care providers and patients. Review websites must meet these requirements with a high level of responsibility and service quality. In this paper, we look at the situation in Lithuania: Especially, we are interested in the available possibilities of evaluation and interaction, and the quality of a particular review website measured against the available data. We thereby identify quality weaknesses and lay the foundation for future research.