Opinion Surveys

We regularly survey area CHECKBOOK and Consumer Reports subscribers for their feedback on services they have used. For our survey on primary care physicians, we asked consumers to rate their experiences with doctors they had most recently used "poor," "fair," "good," "very good," or "excellent" on several aspects of service, including—

• Listening to/communicating with you;
• Personal manner (courtesy, respect, sensitivity, friendliness);
• Spending enough time with you;
• Seeking your input in making decisions;
• Coordinating your care;
• Giving prevention/self-help advice;
• Thoroughness, carefulness, and apparent competence;
• Arranging to see you quickly when you request;
• Giving timely, helpful advice by phone or e-mail;
• Keeping down office waiting time; and
• Overall quality.

Our Ratings Tables show what percentage of the respondents who rated each physician described the physician as "very good" or "excellent" (as opposed to "poor," "fair," or "good") on each of these questions. We have included on our Ratings Tables all of the physicians for whom we received at least 10 ratings on our customer surveys and whose scores were at least above average.

Keep in mind that the survey responses are inherently subjective. The relationship between you and a physician will be very personal; hence a physician our respondents liked may not be right for you.

Since many firms were rated by rather small numbers of raters, small differences between two firms in the percentage of raters who gave a particular rating (say, "superior") should be ignored. The table below gives a rough guide to minimum differences you should look for in deciding on one firm over another.

Board Certification Information

Our Ratings Tables also indicate whether the listed physicians were board certified when we checked with the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) in July 2009. The tables also indicate the specialty fields in which physicians were board certified. We also asked the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) to provide board certification information for physicians on our list who have osteopathic medical degrees, but the AOA declined to grant us permission to use that information in our lists.

Information shown on the tables on board certifications copyright ©2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The ABMS data provided in this report have been extracted and manipulated from the Directory Database compiled by Elsevier and ABMS to publish The Official American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS®) Directory. This product or service has not been designated as an Official ABMS Display Agent and thus the ABMS data provided is not deemed valid for Primary Source Verification (PSV) purposes as required for accrediting organizations.

The presence and display of ABMS certification data does not in any way constitute any affiliation, association with or endorsement by ABMS or its Member Boards, or any Board Certified Physician of any promotion or sponsorship appearing in these pages or related websites. The Board Certification data is provided as a public service in cooperation with Elsevier.

Timeliness of the Data

All of the data must be interpreted in view of timeliness. Our customer survey data are from surveys conducted from January 2004 to February 2009. Survey respondents were asked to report on experiences in the preceding year.