Now, a web portal to rate how ‘patient-friendly’ your doctor is

Last year, Gadre and Shukla, along with other like-minded doctors, Dr Anant Phadke and Dr Abhijit More, launched the Pune Citizen Doctors Forum (PCDF). On the occasion of World Health Day, on April 7, PCDF will launch a web portal — http://www.medimitra.org — that will allow patients to rate their doctors by registering the doctor’s name on the portal and answering six questions. The questions are: What is your overall experience, did the doctor give you adequate time, did the doctor explain your disease and the required treatment, did the doctor answer your queries, did your doctor refer you to a specific drugstore, and do you think the charges were transparent?

Based on the answers given by the patient, the system will automatically generate a score and based on that score, the doctor’s name will be automatically added to the list of patient-friendly doctors. “The forum will not do anything… it’s the patients who prepare the list. The patients can give their feedback while remaining anonymous. We want the patients to judge their doctors more objectively. If more patients register their doctors and share their opinion, the list will be valid. The information may be useful for other patients looking for ethical doctors. For instance, if a patient is looking for a cardiologist, s/he may visit the website and look for cardiologists registered there,” explained Phadke.

The Forum has an advisory board which comprises eminent persons from medical and social fields, such as senior gynaecologist Dr Sanjay Gupte, RTI activist Vivek Velankar, Dr Pratibha Kulkarni, and senior activist of consumer rights, Suryakant Pathak, among others. The managing committee members include doctors as well as people from other backgrounds — Dr Sharda Bapat, Dr Shreeram Geet, Dr Madhavee Agashe, Ulhas Sawant and Deepak Tawri, among others.

The Forum aims to organise discussions among patient-friendly doctors and local residents on topics such as the patients’ rights and responsibilities, dilemmas in rational, ethical practice, the policy of health care for all, to understand each other’s problems and help each other take remedial steps, to make patients aware of not only their rights but also of their responsibilities, to prepare and publish with the help of such doctors, standard educational material in the layman’s language.

The primary aim of the portal is to overcome the growing ‘trust deficit’ between patients and doctors. “We don’t want to make sweeping statements against doctors. There are good and bad people in all professions. There is a community of doctors who want to practice medicine ethically. It is a dwindling community but it does exist… there is a section of enlightened citizens as well as a group of ethical and rational doctors. We want to bring these two groups together…,” said Dr Phadke.