Are doctors created equal ? An investigation of online ratings by patients

There is broad consensus among policy makers and consumer groups that greater transparency in healthcare will improve the quality and costs of care delivered. In recent years several government-led transparency initiatives have focused on healthcare institutes like hospitals (Jha et al. 2005, Harris and Buntin 2008). Up to now patients still have very little means of discerning the quality of physicians, even though there is evidence that the variation of quality across individual physicians can be substantial (Gawande 2002).