Zagat Guide for Doctor's Offices

Implications: Zagat guides have been used with the immense popularity in the evaluation of restaurants, hotels and shopping sites.  The current plan is to apply these to doctor's offices- not physician quality.  The concept is nice and may be more meaningful for patients than to Wellpoint's business. 

Analysis: This concept engenders mixed feelings.  In practice, the function of an office represents a physician and consumers should have information about how an office functions.  However, many quality physicians in large hospital systems cannot control their office quality and the ability to hire supporting staff and offer niceties that would win Zagat points has been limited by reduced reimbursement from insurers who are now feeding back this information to patients.  I think this concept will be popular among patients and will certainly be used- right or wrong- by patients as another factor to consider in choosing their physician.