My good friend Gale Wilson-Steele and her new company CareSeek, Inc. have launched NursesRateDoctors.com, a social media networking platform, focused on gathering nurse ratings and reviews of doctors. The NursesRateDoctors online platform where nurses can anonymously join the site and provide their insights on physicians will accumulate a vast knowledge base of information critical to helping a patient seeking a provider.
NurseRateDoctors is campaigning nurses to participate and to encourage their peers to collectively write one million reviews. In a survey of nurses conducted this year, 76.8% said they would rate providers and write reviews and 46% indicated that they would invite their friends to do the same. The nurses agreeded to their top reasons for participating in the effort, with 91.3% feeling that "this is important information to share for the good of the public" and 92.8% feeling that "this provides an opportunity to applaud some great providers." The information supplied by the nurses will create the foundation for a robust content resource at CareSeek.com that will stimulate the continued growth of online patient, nurse and doctor interaction and communication.
"There is more information available about i-Phones than there is about physicians", explains Gale. "The patient is the most important participant in the care delivery process, and yet communication and information delivery traditionally has not been focused on the patient. At some point, we all are patients, and we cannot be good healthcare consumers without access to relevant information."
Gale continues, "NursesRateDoctors is critical to provide first hand information to patients from nurses who work with these medical professionals everyday. With tools to protect their identity, nurses can share their opinions and perspectives about numerous doctors - both good and bad. "Not every doctor is right for every patient, and part of finding the best healthcare partner is understanding more about a physician's style, office etiquette as well as clinical expertise. Nurses not only have daily interactions with the doctors, but they see them in action with many patients."
So visit Gale's site and let me know what you think! I'm particularly interested because Gale and I had many discussions about making this type of information available when she was still in the planning phase. It is good to see the results of these efforts.
Social networking is the new frontier in healthcare. Whether it's networking amongst professionals like NursesRatesDoctors or PeerClip, or more casual networking like PinkTogether.com, the idea of sharing information among peers and colleagues is gaining momentum across the Internet, specifically in healthcare . It will be interesting to see how Web sites like these impact the future of the healthcare industry. Read HIN's blog entry about social networking in the healthcare arena at http://blog.hin.com/?p=150 .
Posted by: Healthcare Intelligence Network | October 02, 2007 at 06:50 AM