“I posted a negative review” on Yelp, a client of a California dentist wrote in 2013. The shock of exposure can be effective, prompting patients to back off. The patients affected say they’ve been doubly injured - first by poor service or care and then by the disclosure of information they considered private. In dozens of instances, responses to complaints about medical care turned into disputes over patient privacy. Using a tool developed by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, we identified more than 3,500 one-star reviews (the lowest) in which patients mention privacy or HIPAA. Yelp has given ProPublica unprecedented access to its trove of public reviews - more than 1.7 million in all - allowing us to search them by keyword. The law forbids them from disclosing any patient health information without permission. But in trying to respond to negative ones, some providers appear to be violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA. The vast majority of reviews are positive. Health professionals are adapting to a harsh reality in which consumers rate them on sites like Yelp, Vitals and RateMDs much as they do restaurants, hotels and spas. … You can live in a world of denial and simply believe what you want to hear from your other dentist or make an educated and informed decision.” “I looked very closely at your radiographs and it was obvious that you have cavities and gum disease that your other dentist has overlooked. I absolutely recommended an x-ray to determine if this condition existed this x-ray was at no additional cost to you.”Īnd a California dentist scolded a patient who accused him of misdiagnosing her. “The exam identified one or more of the signs I mentioned above for scoliosis. “You brought your daughter in for the exam in early March 2014,” he wrote. In California, a chiropractor pushed back against a mother’s claims that he misdiagnosed her daughter with scoliosis. One Washington state dentist turned the tables on a patient who blamed him for the loss of a molar: “Due to your clenching and grinding habit, this is not the first molar tooth you have lost due to a fractured root,” he wrote. In the course of these arguments - which have spilled out publicly on ratings sites like Yelp - doctors, dentists, chiropractors and massage therapists, among others, have divulged details of patients’ diagnoses, treatments and idiosyncrasies. Burned by negative reviews, some health providers are casting their patients’ privacy aside and sharing intimate details online as they try to rebut criticism.
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