Online review of medical services:Experiences from the UK and US and their implications to China / 中国卫生政策研究

ABSTRACT

With the rapid development of Internet, the number of online medical service review websites has gradually increased, whereby more and more patients use those engines to share their experience in health treatment, discuss the quality of medical services or rate physicians, and make more researches on medical institutions and doc-tors just to detailed information on the remedies of their health cases. This paper selected the UK and US as typical cases of countries that have rapidly developed in this field, and focused on UK’s NHS Choices and the United States’ RateMDs, Healthgrades and Yelp websites. Their current status, organization structure, content, characteristics, ex-perience and problems were analyzed and summarized. At present, China’s medical service online review is still in the ascendant, but the relevant policies and academic research are facing scarcity. Based on the situation in China and the experience from the UK and US, this paper proposed policy suggestions as follows (1) Establishing a na-tional comprehensive medical service platform led by the government or professional and competent association which integrates health information query, retrieval and medical service review functions. (2) Set up a scientific and pro-fessional organization structure for standardized and orderly governance. (3) Combining the subjective reviews with objective quality indicators. (4) Adopting performance evaluation, and so on. All of these concerns are proposed in order to improve the medical service transparency and responsiveness, and to promote the medical service quality im-provement.