What a world it is where patients can form an opinion about their fertility doctor before they even schedule an appointment. A 2013 study shows that 90% of respondents reported that online reviews influenced their purchase decisions. Through public feedback from their peers, people dealing with infertility have a plethora of information to make their decision from online review sites that exist for the benefit of the patient. Here's where it gets interesting. Fertility centers can also benefit from online reviews--good, bad, or neutral--by using them to deeply understand and adapt to patient habits. By carefully examining the online reputations of the most highly rated fertility specialists in the country, we have further decoded the messages that patients are sending loud and clear.
We know from initial research that the success of an individual's treatments using Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) greatly influences how they write their review of their fertility clinic. Positive fertility clinic reviews are three and a half times more likely to mention a baby or pregnancy than to mention lack of success or make no mention at all. Equally, negative reviews are three times more likely to reference leaving the practice before success than to mention a baby or to make no mention at all. We also know that positive fertility center reviews outnumber negative reviews by more than 2 to 1. Getting some ideas from Joseph Davis, DO of RMA of New York, we wanted to dig beyond these observations to try to answer more questions:
Do the same patterns apply to fertility doctors with almost no negative reviews?
Does an REI's rating correspond to his or her practice's success rates?
Do the clinics with the highest success rates have high online ratings?
What is the correlation between an REI's gender and his or her online reputation?
Are younger docs rated more highly than their veteran colleagues?
Limits to the data
First, several review sites are popular for rating fertility doctors, and they are not uniform. Some sites, like Healthgrades, offer only star ratings without qualitative responses. Other sites likes Fertility Authority, Vitals, Google, and Zocdoc have the option to leave star ratings with or without comments. Yelp and RateMDs include qualitative responses with their reviews. Yelp tends to be more deeply populated by place (practice) reviews as opposed to reviews for individual doctors. In the latest phase of this research project analyzing fertility doctor reviews, I chose to use RateMDs because it is the easiest platform to search by sub-specialty.
There are 2,264 reproductive endocrinologists listed on RateMDs, mostly from the United States and Canada. We can search them by both highest-rated overall and per metropolitan area. Still, RateMDs isn't a perfect source. There are many duplicate profiles and only 1,205 (53%) of the physician profiles have any reviews at all. Furthermore, the rate of adoption for every review site varies widely by market. On RateMDs for example, there are 929 reviews of reproductive endocrinologists in Toronto, but in a very similarly-sized market, Houston, there are only 380. Lastly, you may be listed as an OBGYN, and not as an REI (or both in the case of duplicate listings). With that said, when we check someone's RateMDs rating (if they have ten or more reviews) against reviews on other platforms, we find they are consistent.
I'm really excited by a newer review site that Dr. Dan Nayot brought to my attention, called Fertility IQ. You may have thought it was my site if I sent you the link to your listing. It isn't. Though I sometimes wish it was, because much of the data that I aggregate manually, they will soon be able to export with the click of a button. Most doctors don't yet have enough reviews for meaningful comparison, but I see this site becoming very popular over the next six to twenty-four months. The user experience (UX) for patients is outstanding and the site validates patient authenticity. Both the qualitative and quantitative questions are more in-depth than any other channel. Above all, there is a market need for a uniform, clean, and extensive platform to compare fertility doctors and clinics, and I hope this is it. In the meantime, I manually scour reviews for data like a cyber caveman.
Fertility IQ's home page
Of course, there are limits to ranking clinics by IVF success rates as well. Partly because the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) appeals that success rates not be used to compare clinics. Consequently, they don't rank them in a spreadsheet that we can easily pull. So we use the site, fertilitysucceessrates.com. While Fertility Success Rates makes it easy to check the top 25 clinics in the United States, some clinics are missing from the site's overall listings, even though their data can be found in the annual CDC report. Despite the limits in our data, we continue to notice some interesting patterns.
1). Do the same patterns apply to doctors with almost no negative reviews?
Yes...and no. I analyzed the first ten reviews of each of the top 25 rated reproductive endocrinologists. Of the 250 reviews
164 explicitly referenced a baby or pregnancy
70 contained neither a reference to a baby or pregnancy nor mention of lack of success
1 mentioned a lack of IVF success
10 described that they were still in treatment
3 referenced treatment other than ART
2 were negative reviews
So these doctors were actually even more likely to have their reviewers mention a baby or pregnancy than their colleagues at large, 66% compared with 60%. What's interesting is that their reviewers were also almost twice as likely to make no mention at all, 28% to 16%. The difference came from those who described still undergoing treatment; 14% for all positive fertility clinic reviews and only 4% for these top 25. Only 1% of these reviews were negative or explicitly referenced a lack of success in treatment. What could be the reason? We know these doctors don't enjoy IVF success rates of 99%. Let's come back to this after we investigate how clinical success rates impact online reputation.
2). Does an REI's rating correspond to his or her practice's success rates?
No. Watch as we take the top 25 ranked reproductive endocrinologists on RateMDs. Then we check them against the top 25 clinics from the 2013 SART reports. Do you have any guesses of how many doctors appeared in both spreadsheets?
Randle Corfman, MD of the Midwest Center for Reproductive Health was the only one. In other words, while success of ART treatment largely predicts how someone will leave a review, success rates do not directly correlate to a physician's online reputation.
These are the highest rated reproductive endocrinologists on ratemds.com
3). Do practices with higher success rates have higher online ratings?
Not by much. It should be stated that practice ratings can be even more difficult to garner than individual physician ratings. For those in the top 25 in success rates, I used the review site that offered the most ratings per clinic. If there were less than ten responses for a clinic on any one review site, I left their rating blank. In a rating scale of one to five, the ratings of 19 of the top 25 clinics in success rates ranged from 2 to 4.5. The mean rating was 3.7 and the median was 3.5. The median for fertility centers at large lies between 3 and 3.5.
Top 25 U.S. fertility clinics by 2013 success rates
4). What is the correlation between the gender of the REI and his or her online rating?
The correlation (or lack thereof) of a physician's gender to fertility doctor reviews will be interesting to further explore.
Do patients have higher standards of judgement for one gender?
Does each gender tend to employ different communication styles that are more or less effective?
Do patient biases cause a message to be received differently from one gender than another?
This is what the current data show us:
Of the top 50 rated REIs on RateMDs, 22% are women and 78% are men.
Of the bottom 50 (of those with a minimum of ten reviews), exactly 50% are men and 50% are women.
*Of those with ten reviews or more
To try to offer some context, Valerie Baker, MD, President of the Society for Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility (SREI), references a recent REI workforce study published by Fertility and Sterility. 38% of the respondents were female and 61% were male.
5). What is the correlation between ratings and years in practice?
I often hear people say that new physicians coming out of residency and fellowship are more savvy of their online reputations than are veterans in the field. I don't know that we have a sufficient way of being able to validate or disprove this inference at this time. We would have to know the year that every REI completed her or his fellowship and their ages; data that isn't easy to find. I can only offer some marketing insight.
I see at least three doctors in the top 25 who I know are under age 40. Two of them are the top rated fertility doctors in metro areas of larger than six million people. Newer doctors can leverage a high online rating to negotiate a partnership plan with a recruiting practice because they can build their online reputation and social media loyalty to become the highest rated fertility doctor in their area before they even complete their fellowship. Conversely, recruiting clinics can look at a physician's online rating and social media presence to make more educated personnel decisions.
Decoding the bigger picture
What lessons are we left with? No clinic and no physician can boast IVF success rates of 99% or anywhere close to it. Yet we count at least a few dozen doctors whose negative reviews are less than 1% of their online reputation. When we look even closer, we see that while success of individual ART treatments influences patient reviews, clinics' success rates don't necessarily predict their online ratings.
This shows us that we are not destined to have a third of our patients report dissatisfaction. As success rates majorly improve across the field, we see that patients still expect more from their care experience than just clinical treatment. Patients who haven't found success through ART may not leave rave reviews or promote their practice on social media and we can appreciate that. Still, if we can deliver to them a better experience than they ever would have had without us, they may not feel as though their only recourse is to express their disappointment online. Analyzing how fertility clinic ratings relate to ART success rates helps us understand exactly to what patients hold their fertility centers accountable.