March 4th, 2011 by Conrad Saam, Marketing

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Let me start out by acknowledging I have an axe to grind.  We don’t agree with business premise of Medical Justice, the company forces patients to sign a legal gag order before they have access to healthcare services.  This censorship of the patient voice, is obviously completely contrary to the transparency and guidance we bring to the medical profession.  Instead of silencing patient experiences, Avvo provides a platform for patients to share through reviews (both positive and negative) of individual doctors.  The notion that Americans’ access to healthcare could be contingent on their willingness to give up their First Ammendment rights of free speech is deplorable.

Medical Justice disagrees with this position and would force patients to sign gag orders in order to see a doctor.  The beauty of this country is that we can have different opinions and the beauty of the web is that we can share and debate those opinions.

Unfortunately, Medical Justice has taken this one step further – deleting content from their own blog in which Avvo and Medical Justice founder, Jeffrey Segal debated the value of patient reviews.  In a post called “OK Docs, Your Talent Can be Reduced to a Number Between One and Ten”, Segal initially refused to post comments written by Avvo.  Eventually he deleted the post from his blog altogether.

Fortunately, for now, we can still see it by accessing Google’s cache of the post.

And while Segal refused to post all of our comments when the post was live, I did keep a copy.  In the spirit of transparency and a small protest against gag orders and censorship, I’ll share Avvo’s last comments which pushed Jeffrey Segal to delete his own words:

Some comments on this thread remind me of the initial reaction from some of the legal practitioners when launched in 2007.  Since then, Avvo has become the market leader in legal – driving more business to the industry than any other directory.  How did a newcomer like Avvo stand out in a crowded and competitive field?  By offering consumers access to more information and better guidance than they’ve ever had before.

Put yourself in the shoes of the average American with a child facing a life-threatening medical issue.  You want to make a smart decision in the practitioner that you hire.  You want the very best doctor in your city, or in the country.  How do you find her?  The medical directories you visit are thinly veiled pay for play shills.  The Yellow Pages show you who has the largest advertising budget.  Your child’s life is in jeopardy.  You are lost and you are scared.

Enter Avvo.

At Avvo, you find detailed background profiles of doctors – and while you don’t have the medical background to identify the prestigious school, awards and associations on the doctor’s resume, the Avvo Rating translates these elements into an easy to understand numerical scale.  On Avvo, you also have access to client reviews – that bedside manner that is so important.

The gag orders that Medical Justice peddles serves to choke out patient access to those client reviews.   Jeff, if you had your way, patients would be relegated to playing roulette with pay for play shills like the yellow pages where doctors compete based on the size of their marketing budget instead of the strength of their resume, bedside manner and industry prowess.  You would silence those patients who have had horrendous experiences with awful doctors.  This is old school thinking. The industry is evolving. Medical Justice’s gag orders retard that evolution.

You raise issues around transparency, using the Coke analogy, but you miss the point.  All of the “ingredients” of the Avvo Rating are in plain sight, in front of every consumer – right on that doctor’s profile.  Avvo offers more transparency than any medical directory.  Additionally, our client reviews must meet stringent community guidelines, which are laid out in a blog post here.

Jeff, you actually make the most important point:  “If your Avvo number has any connection to objective reality, the market can and will value it.”  This is exactly what happened in the legal industry and is starting to happen in medical – over 2 million patients visiting Avvo every month, embracing the transparency we provide to make smart, informed decisions.  You can’t argue with that groundswell of interest among the American public.  Embrace progress, don’t stifle it with contracts that silence the public’s right to voice their dissatisfaction with the bottom end of the medical spectrum.

Medical Justice would silence not only patients’ right to share their bad experiences about a doctor, but also squelch any discourse regarding their own business practices.  We have recently seen in Libya and Egypt how access to information can transform a society.  While that may sound overly lofty, this is America and we are the vanguard of basic rights like free speech and access to healthcare.  Making one contingent on forgoing  the other is repugnant.  Medical Justice would send all patients back to the dark ages.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 4th, 2011 at 10:11 am by Conrad Saam, Marketing and is filed under Conrad Saam Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.