Welcome to checkMD

There are two primary benefits to using the checkMD online system. First, checkMD helps patients find the right healthcare provider to meet their specific needs. Second, checkMD helps the best providers get more referrals from qualified patients seeking help. Let's look at the issues facing patients and providers who are trying to find each other on the Internet.

Patients

When patients are researching potential healthcare providers, they often use Internet search engines to make their job easy. When search results are displayed, ratings and reviews often appear at the top of the list. However, patients can be misled by the ratings they find on the Internet. Here's why:

Rating versus Ranting. A provider may have a wonderful track record with the vast majority of his or her patients, but it is often the one disgruntled customer who takes time to comment on a ratings website. Additionally, since online ratings are anonymous, sometimes malicious ratings are posted by competitors, or others seeking to unfairly harm a healthcare provider. Those negative postings draw attention and visibility on the Internet, damaging the reputation of the provider and steering patients away from what otherwise might be the right provider for them.
Popularity versus Peculiarity. Search engines equate ratings with popularity and increase search rankings accordingly. So providers with lots of negative ratings may actually rank higher in search engine results than more qualified providers. This means that providers with potentially bad reputations often generate the most Web traffic.

Providers

More providers are recognizing the strength of the Internet to give them a presence with their current and future patients. However, providers face significant challenges brought about by the Internet.

With all their years of schooling and experience, very few have been trained in running an Internet business. Even a highly qualified provider can get passed over by patients who are drawn to providers who know how to drive Web traffic.
Providers can lose control of their reputations and begin to lose patients because of a few malicious or unfair comments posted on a popular ratings site. Since satisfied patients rarely post ratings on the Internet, providers need a way to proactively and fairly manage their reputations online. Not only to fend off the few random naysayers who invariably emerge, but to be represented fairly online by a cross section of all their patients.

How checkMD helps

checkMD helps patients find competent and qualified physicians by first screening all practitioners before posting their information to the checkMD website. For each approved practitioner, checkMD then posts patient satisfaction ratings that have been verified for authenticity by a third-party company.

checkMD helps providers capture the opinions of their satisfied patients and gives those patients a voice online by means of the checkMD Patient Satisfaction Index (PSI). This constantly updated rating reflects patients' true satisfaction with a practitioner as well as the percent of patients who would recommend the practitioner to others. With the checkMD Patient Satisfaction Index, providers can protect themselves against negative rating sites, regain control of their reputations, and climb the search engine rankings, ensuring that they are found online by prospective patients.

The PSI creates a level online playing field and insures that the best healthcare providers are given the highest visibility possible in search engine rankings. The PSI also ensures that providers are represented fairly online by a cross section of all their patients. Additionally, providers, practice managers and administrators can receive accurate, real-time verified patient satisfaction feedback that leads to increased quality of care for their practice.

Third-party Verification

checkMD only accepts ratings and reviews from verified patients of each provider via a patent-pending ratings process. Only checkMD goes to the lengths of getting a third-party company-Internet Verification Services (IVS)—to verify all ratings data. IVS is a third-party auditing company that provides independent verifications of all checkMD Patient Satisfaction data.

The patent-pending ratings process followed by IVS:

Protects the identity of the patient doing the rating.
Insures that the rating content is not manipulated by checkMD or the Provider.
Maintains the integrity of the rating, as each rating is independently validated and verified by IVS (an independent 3rd party company) to be from an actual patient (or parent/guardian of an actual patient) of the provider being rated.

Summary

There are a lot of horror stories about patients getting burned by poor healthcare providers. In many cases, these stories are warranted. But because of the anonymous nature of online ratings and the advent of malicious postings, when a patient researches a provider before visiting their practice, they need a source they can trust for accurate, independent patient satisfaction data.

Patients can trust checkMD to do the pre-screening and verification of each participating physician ahead of time so they can find the best, most qualified provider to meet their specific needs. And the best providers (only the best providers qualify) can get in front of a larger number of qualified patients, increase new patient referrals and ultimately grow their practices in a fair, unbiased online environment.

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Find out more about how the unique checkMD system works. Contact us at sales[at]checkMD.com.