RateMDs Review Guide

Who uses RateMDs

Physicians and other healthcare providers and their practices are listed. Patients post ratings based on their own first-hand experience, and prospective patients use the site to search, including with a verified-profiles filter.

Claim your profile

1. Create a RateMDs user account.
2. Find the provider profile and claim it (the help center says claiming is how you get management access).
3. Claiming gives the profile a verified checkmark, and patients can filter search results to Verified Profiles Only.
4. After claiming, keep details up to date such as name, photo, biography, languages, whether you accept new patients or offer virtual appointments, specialty, areas of expertise, facility name, phone number and practice website.
5. Staff who work with more than one provider can claim several provider profiles under one user account.

Official guidelines: help.ratemds.com

Replying to reviews

After claiming the profile, sign in, open the Ratings section from the left sidebar, type a reply in the text box below the rating and click Add Response. A response must be between 50 and 5,000 characters.

• RateMDs tells providers not to share protected health information, such as details about a patient or their medical condition, in a response.
• Its guidance suggests using the response to invite the patient to contact the office directly to resolve any issues.
• Providers can subscribe to be notified of new ratings.
• Providers who subscribe to the Rating Concierge service get a 7-day private preview of lower-rated submissions, during which they can contact the patient to resolve the issue or appeal to the Validation Team. Otherwise the rating is published when the window ends.

Official guidelines: help.ratemds.com

Review rules

In our own words. The official page is the rule that applies.

• Ratings should describe the writer's own first-hand experience with the specific provider.
• Language must be respectful and family-friendly, without vulgar remarks, hate speech, insults, threats or discriminatory comments.
• Staff members should not be named, and phone numbers, email addresses and residential or commercial addresses should not be included.
• Secondhand accounts, broad generalizations, naming other providers and accusations of illegal activity can lead to removal.
• Flooding a profile with positive ratings (astroturfing) or negative ratings (spamming), repeated posts and soliciting can lead to removal.
• Ratings of court-appointed assessments or Independent Medical Examinations (for example workers' compensation or insurance-related assessments) may be removed because they do not involve a doctor-patient relationship.
• RateMDs says a low score, or a provider disliking what was written, is never a reason to remove feedback.

Official guidelines: help.ratemds.com

Reporting a review

RateMDs's own process, step by step.

1. Find the flag button located underneath the rating.
2. Click it and complete the pop-up prompts.
3. The Rating Validation Team reviews flagged ratings, generally within 3 business days. The flagging system does not currently send you a response.
4. Only ratings that violate the Terms of Use are removed, so flagging does not guarantee removal.
5. If there is no flag option, the rating is waiting to be reviewed or was reviewed and re-approved.
6. RateMDs says providers and their staff cannot pay to have ratings edited, deleted or hidden.

Official guidelines: help.ratemds.com

Tips

• Claim the profile so you can respond and keep contact details current.
• Respond calmly and without any patient-identifying or condition details.
• Invite the patient to contact the office directly to resolve concerns.
• Do not pay anyone to alter or remove ratings, and do not post or solicit fake ratings.
• Flag only ratings that truly break the posted rules.