Examining the Role of Physician Characteristics in Web-Based Verified Primary Care Physician Reviews: Observational Study.

Background: Doctor review websites have become increasingly popular as a source of information for patients looking to select a primary care provider. Zocdoc is one such platform that allows patients to not only rate and review their experiences with doctors but also directly schedule appointments. This study examines how several physician characteristics including gender, age, race, languages spoken in a physician's office, education, and facial attractiveness impact the average numerical rating of primary care doctors on Zocdoc.

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the association between physician characteristics and patient satisfaction ratings on Zocdoc.

Methods: A data set of 1455 primary care doctor profiles across 30 cities was scraped from Zocdoc. The profiles contained information on the physician's gender, education, and languages spoken in their office. Age, facial attractiveness, and race were imputed from profile pictures using commercial facial analysis software. Each doctor profile listed an average overall satisfaction rating, bedside manner rating, and wait time rating from verified patients. Descriptive statistics, the Wilcoxon rank sum test, and multivariate logistic regression were used to analyze the data.

Results: The average overall rating on Zocdoc was highly positive, with older age, lower facial attractiveness, foreign degrees, allopathic degrees, and speaking more languages negatively associated with the average rating. However, the effect sizes of these factors were relatively small. For example, graduates of Latin American medical schools had a mean overall rating of 4.63 compared to a 4.77 rating for US graduates (P<.001), a difference roughly equivalent to a 2.8% decrease in appointments. On multivariate analysis, being Asian and having a doctor of osteopathic medicine degree were positively associated with higher overall ratings, while attending a South Asian medical school and speaking more European and Middle Eastern languages in the office were negatively associated with higher overall ratings.

Conclusions: Overall, the findings suggest that age, facial attractiveness, education, and multilingualism do have some impact on web-based doctor reviews, but the numerical effect is small. Notably, bias may play out in many forms. For example, a physician's appearance or accent may impact a patient's trust, confidence, or satisfaction with their physician, which could in turn influence their take-up of preventative services and lead to either better or worse health outcomes. The study highlights the need for further research in how physician characteristics influence patient ratings of care.