Why Online Hospital Ratings Could Be Bad For Your Health

A new study finds that online ratings of hospitals and doctors could be hurtful.

Doctor With Clipboard

NYU’s Stern School of Business found that emphasizing online ratings could cause hospitals to focus on a specific area of care to improve, causing them to ignore other, vital services they could improve.

The study found this kind of focus could cause a “distortion” in hospital priorities, that would eventually be detrimental to patient care.

One example noted that ranking hospitals based on attractiveness could cause the institution to focus on renovations in order to attract new patients — taking away resources from increasing nursing staff.

The study was conducted by NYU Stern Associate Professor Heski Bar-Isaac and his co-authors Guillermo Caruana of Centro Estudios Monetarios y Financieros and Vicente Cunat of the London School of Economics, and will be published in the Journal of Industrial Economics as “Information-Gathering Externalities for a Multi-Attribute Good.”