5 Hidden Patterns Uncovered Across the Top 25 Fertility Doctors in Patient Reviews
What a world it is where patients can form an opinion about their fertility doctor before they even schedule an appointment. A 2013 study shows that 90% of respondents reported that online reviews influenced their purchase decisions. Through public feedback from their peers, people dealing with infertility have a plethora of information to make their decision from online review sites that exist for the benefit of the patient. Fertility centers can also benefit from online reviews--good, bad, or neutral--by using them to deeply understand and adapt to patient habits.
Patterns in Patient Feedback
By carefully examining the online reputations of the most highly rated fertility specialists in the country, we have further decoded the messages that patients are sending loud and clear. We know from initial research that the success of an individual's treatments using Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) greatly influences how they write their review of their fertility clinic. Positive fertility clinic reviews are three and a half times more likely to mention a baby or pregnancy than to mention lack of success or make no mention at all. Equally, negative reviews are three times more likely to reference leaving the practice before success than to mention a baby or to make no mention at all. We also know that positive fertility center reviews outnumber negative reviews by more than 2 to 1.
Key Research Questions
To dig beyond these observations, we wanted to try to answer more questions:
- Do the same patterns apply to fertility doctors with almost no negative reviews?
- Does an REI's rating correspond to his or her practice's success rates?
- Do the clinics with the highest success rates have high online ratings?
- What is the correlation between an REI's gender and his or her online reputation?
- Are younger docs rated more highly than their veteran colleagues?
Analyzing Review Platforms
First, several review sites are popular for rating fertility doctors, and they are not uniform. Some sites, like Healthgrades, offer only star ratings without qualitative responses. Other sites likes Fertility Authority, Vitals, Google, and Zocdoc have the option to leave star ratings with or without comments. Yelp and RateMDs include qualitative responses with their reviews. Yelp tends to be more deeply populated by place (practice) reviews as opposed to reviews for individual doctors. In the latest phase of this research project analyzing fertility doctor reviews, I chose to use RateMDs because it is the easiest platform to search by sub-specialty.
There are 2,264 reproductive endocrinologists listed on RateMDs, mostly from the United States and Canada. Still, RateMDs isn't a perfect source. There are many duplicate profiles and only 1,205 (53%) of the physician profiles have any reviews at all. Furthermore, the rate of adoption for every review site varies widely by market. On RateMDs for example, there are 929 reviews of reproductive endocrinologists in Toronto, but in a very similarly-sized market, Houston, there are only 380.
Comparison of Review Statistics
| Metric | Data Point |
|---|---|
| Influence of online reviews on purchase decisions | 90% |
| Ratio of positive reviews to negative reviews | More than 2 to 1 |
| Likelihood of positive reviews mentioning a baby or pregnancy | 3.5x more likely |
| Likelihood of negative reviews referencing leaving the practice | 3x more likely |
| RateMDs profiles with reviews | 53% (1,205 out of 2,264) |
Emerging Industry Standards
A newer review site, called Fertility IQ, validates patient authenticity. Both the qualitative and quantitative questions are more in-depth than any other channel. Above all, there is a market need for a uniform, clean, and extensive platform to compare fertility doctors and clinics. Of course, there are limits to ranking clinics by IVF success rates as well, partly because the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) appeals that success rates not be used to compare clinics. In the meantime, I manually scour reviews for data like a cyber caveman.