Why Medical Justice’s Anti-Defamation Plan is the wrong prescription for you, your business, and your patients.
We understand that many doctors—including, perhaps, you—worry about online reviews by patients. After all, patients may not understand the practice of medicine as well as doctors do, and a single negative patient review could, in theory, hurt your business.
Medical Justice offers a seemingly easy solution to the “problem” of online consumer reviews. It gives you a form agreement that you can mix into the thick stack of papers you already give new patients. Most patients will sign whatever doctors ask of them, and once they do, you may be tempted to think that the online review “problem” has been magically solved.
But just as you wouldn’t prescribe a pill before understanding its side effects, you shouldn’t buy Medical Justice’s sales pitch without thoroughly investigating it. For one, online patient reviews are here to stay, and anti-review contracts will not make them go away. Instead, hiding from patients’ reviews will just end up hurting those doctors as they find themselves falling behind their more progressive peers. Second, anti-review contracts can cause patients to lose their trust in their doctors and encourage prospective patients to take their business elsewhere. In addition, they raise serious risks of potential legal liability and ethical condemnation. No matter how you look at it, Medical Justice’s anti-review contracts could be a very bad deal for you.
[Note: we initially posted this page in 2011. A few months later, Medical Justice “retired” its form. In 2016, Congress enacted the Consumer Review Fairness Act banning anti-review contracts.]