What patients say about their doctors

Consumers Checkbook What Patients Say About Their Doctors

Would you like to know what thousands of surveyed patients say about their experience of care with doctors you might use for your care? This website will tell you what patients have said about hundreds of different doctors in the greater Kansas City, Memphis, and Denver-Boulder areas, and in New York County (Manhattan)—

  • How well the doctor communicates
  • How easy it is to get access to the doctor when you need it
  • Helpfulness of the doctor's office staff
  • Much more information
To see ratings of doctors in your area, enter your zip code:
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Unlike what you might see elsewhere on the Internet, the doctor ratings on this website are based on enough completed surveys to be reliable—usually responses from more than 45 of each doctor's actual patients. This is a representative, independently selected sample of patients verified to have actually seen the doctor in the preceding year. The questions and procedures used in the survey were developed by the federal government's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Consumers' CHECKBOOK/Center for the Study of Services (CHECKBOOK/CSS), an independent, non-profit consumer organization, sponsored the survey. CHECKBOOK/CSS collaborated with coalitions of consumers and healthcare leaders in each community where the survey was done and also with leading health plans: Aetna, UnitedHealthcare, CIGNA HealthCare, and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans in Kansas City and Tennessee.

These collaborating organizations hope that the survey will help patients choose doctors, will help patients talk with their doctor about ways in which they might like their doctor to interact with them differently, and will encourage and guide doctors to improve their interactions with patients.

For now, the reports are limited to four regions. Also for now, the reports focus on care for adults and on primary care doctors—doctors you would use as a personal or family doctor—and a few specialties. (In the Denver and Kansas City areas, only primary care doctors are included; in the Memphis area, cardiologists and obstetricians/gynecologists are also included; and in the New York area, all these types of doctors and also gastroenterologists and orthopedists are included.) Not all doctors of these types are included; CHECKBOOK/CSS will be including more regions and more doctors in future surveys. (Doctors who would like information on being included can send an e-mail to [email protected].)