October 22, 2007 - Health benefits company WellPoint Inc. and Zagat Survey LLC today announced the upcoming launch of a new online survey tool that will allow consumers to share their physician experiences with others.
WellPoint will begin to offer the online tool using the Zagat approach to select members in its Blue Cross and/or Blue Shield licensed subsidiaries in January 2008.
The new survey tool will provide a vehicle for members to review and evaluate physicians based on a set of distinct qualities, creating a resource to support informed member decision-making. Through this partnership, Zagat said it is helping WellPoint address an unmet need for peer-to-peer interaction among health care consumers, enabling consumers to provide feedback on their experiences with individual physicians and then rate their experience on Zagat's 30-point scale.
The online survey tool will allow consumers to review their doctor visits based on trust, communication, availability, and environment. The survey will also feature a comments section, allowing members to share comments to expand on their ratings. The survey and results will be available free of charge to members via their health plan Web site.
For each network physician, the online entry will display contact information, ratings on a 30-point scale for each of the four categories, and the percentage of members who recommend that physician. The most recent comments will be displayed first, and members will have the option to rate the usefulness of comments and report suspicious comments.
For more information: www.wellpoint.com, http://zagat.com/