A wary eye on those reviews

I've been analyzing reviews left on different sites and found something surprising. While I knew that some reviews are not actually left by patients who had seen the health care provider, I was surprised to see how widespread the problem can be. For example, if you perform an internet search for "I was worried that they were going to wear an obnoxious cologne", you might see many thousands of reviews on a site that include that specific phrasing. That suggests that someone developed software to automatically post reviews on a site. Unfortunately, without seeing a number of reviews across different providers, it can be hard to detect problems like this. (There are other phrases elsewhere that indicate similar issues.)

Assessing the value of patient reviews is tricky... on one hand, they can offer valuable feedback from actual patients; on the other hand, it's hard to know whether any specific review represents an authentic encounter. Hence, when selecting a provider, you might want to consider other aspects of a provider's care (in addition to the patient reviews that have been left about that provider).