How many of us actually understand the meaning of “Board Certification” and how many of us actually care whether our doctor is board certified or not.

Board certified officially means that the physician is an exceptional expert in a particular specialty and/or subspecialty of medical practice and has gone through the required training to practice medicine.  It also means that the physician is committed and is consistently achieving superior clinical outcomes in patient-focused setting.

It is believed that for patient like us the board certification is the best measure of a physician’s knowledge, experience and skills to provide quality healthcare within a given specialty. Is it really true?

Does this board certification actually make any difference in patient outcome? May be it does but nobody is sure. We believe that general public never cared where their doctor went for medical school.  People care for quality health outcomes and timeliness. Most of us even don’t know the difference between Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine (DOs) and Doctors of Medicine (MDs). They both go by Primary Care Physician (PCP); the DO is an Osteopathic physician, while MD is Allopathic physicians.  Many don’t even care if they get timely care from a Physician Assistant (PA) or a Nurse practitioner.

So we tried to dig little more into this at American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS); a nationally recognized organization certifying doctors. After a tedious search process, we got something very interesting

“The physician certification information in the ABMS database is updated periodically with data provided by its Member Boards. Due to the possibility of reporting and processing delays, the accuracy and completeness of records cannot be guaranteed. ABMS shall not be liable to you or others for any decision made or action taken by you in reliance on the information obtained from this service.  It is the user’s responsibility to determine that the physician record obtained is that of the physician whose information is sought”

So… what now…ABMS is telling us that it’s OUR responsibility to determine… so guess we are left with our gut feel while choosing a doctor.

We are not saying that board certification or doctor credential doesn’t mean anything, Doing a background check into your doctor’s credentials is important to be sure they are appropriate and current. But there are other things in addition to credentials that patient needs to think about before choosing the right doctor, such as does the doctor communicate well and believe in building relationship? What is his methodology; prevention or just treatment? Whether he listens to his patient’s concern or just jump on the prescription?  Can doctor relate with the patient?

One’s health is his own and his doctor’s business, nobody wants to disclose health issues to public.  So please take time and research, ask your friends and family when it comes to making right choice for your right doctor…advocate of YOUR health.  We have tried to compile doctor information including reviews from the real patients on DocAsap.com for your convenience, our doctors would love to hear your concerns and they are all Board Certified…J

Today’s beta launch of Medpedia, a wiki joint initiative by various prestigious global institutions (e.g., Harvard Medical School) that only lets pre-screened physicians and PhDs post, raises interesting questions about letting the public post about their conditions and health experiences.  Certainly, the content-rich site will supplement existing health info sites and provide confidence to consumers in the reliability of its information in light of Wikipedia’s medical inaccuracies, and I hope the site builds an active community of physicians to post and moderate.  We definitely like Medpedia’s focus on controlling the quality of content regarding conditions and treatments, categories where users assume advice is coming from authoritative and objective sources and not from those whose accuracy might be suspect (e.g., advertisers or lay people).

Crowd-sourced medical content can at times be useful to the public, such as for doctor reviews (e.g., Vitals.com or RateMDs) and social networking (e.g., PatientslikeMe).  However, in these categories, there have been allegations of misleading doctor reviews on Yelp, and this recent NYT article on Zagat for Doctors seems to dismiss the concept of crowd-sourced doctor reviews entirely, quoting one doctor as stating the Zagat-Wellpoint initiative was “treating medical care provided by dedicated and caring physicians as if we were preparing a meal.”   Our opinion is that while crowd-sourced medical content definitely has a place among screened or expert content to provide consumers with comprehensive info, medical websites should take more effort than, say, restaurant or product review sites to make sure that the public is not provided with misleading information.