On Yelp, Doctors Get Reviewed Like Restaurants — And It Rankles

(8/6/2015) Do you have an experience waiting at a doctor's office for more than a hour? And when the doctor comes and apologizes, all you can say is "It's OK, I understand" because you cannot leave without their treatment? Hospital's waiting line management is probably one of the worst if patients do have a chance to rank. Now people can go to Yelp to complain about it. To some degree, I would agree with one doctor's comment "ranking on doctor's waiting line management, but not on how doctors treat patients professionally."

However, knowing how a waiting line system is mostly influenced by service time uncertainty (the time spent on a patient can varies from several minutes to several hours, which is mostly beyond doctor's control and cause a wide range variation) in healthcare, I also understand the improvement won't be easy. It's very unlikely that we can educate patients to understand the complexity of a waiting line system (most OM/SCM programs don't even cover in their undergraduate curriculum), so it's administrator's responsibility to make it right.