Practo When choosing a doctor, the opinion of others who have been through a similar medical journey is possibly the most valuable advice one can get. The patient story system on Practo borrows from this fact and attempts to collect the most helpful and reliable recommendations from patients.
Every noble cause has a flipside
Just like any other noble movement in the world, our quest for high quality recommendations also faces a few challenges. Ones that affect both, medical practitioners and patients. As a healthcare platform, it’s our duty to share the why and how of our efforts in making healthcare easier for everyone.
3 biggest challenges that plague patient story today are:
- Disparaging comments
Healthcare is a sensitive area and the emotions attached with it? Even more so. Often, patients with negative outcome of the consultation get emotional and unconsciously leave comments that border on abusive and defamatory. This may sound fairly acceptable for commercial businesses like hotels or restaurants but healthcare is different. People forget that their stories directly affects an individual and not an establishment. - Glorified and exaggerated praises
Patient stories, by nature, are supposed to help readers get an idea of the product or service in question. Strangely enough, while personal comments simply vent someone’s anger, the exact opposites are also of little help. Why? Because people with great experiences, often go overboard and compare doctors to the “almighty”/”God”. This takes away the focus from utility of a patient story, which is to highlight appointment experience, efficacy of the treatment and its outcome. - False patient story
The intent of simplifying patient story also bares the platform to users with vested interests such as intentional malign or manipulated praises. We have had hundreds of cases where a majority of patient stories on profiles came from the staff of its establishment.
So what has Practo done to check this?
We work round-the-clock to devise effective countermeasures for challenges like the ones above. Here’s how we are doing it:
- Verification and spam removal
As a healthcare platform, it’s our inherent duty to ensure that only the most genuine stories reaches our users. In theory, it’s just stopping the questionable stories. However, the practical application involves a series of interesting measures, which help us in filtering spam from genuine patient stories. Some of them are:- Verification
Each patient story that goes public is verified before publishing on Practo. Our team ensures that the patient story is published by the patient only and not by someone impersonating his/her identity.
We also collect basic credentials from every patient so that we can verify whether they visited the doctor, if need be. - Strict and efficient moderation system
To keep only constructive patient stories on the platform, every patient story — negative or positive — is seen by a set of eyes. These moderators work hard to ensure that abusive words, indecent language or personal attacks are not published. Having said that, our moderation policy also accommodates the accesors state of mind, and gives him/her the freedom to revise the patient story and re-submit in accordance with the guidelines of our policy, which is structured to keep it simple, reliable and helpful. - Advanced tools to detect suspicious patient stories
Where human observation misses, Practo engages state-of-the-art tools to catch unscrupulous activity. Natural language processing tools identify patterns in patient stories that sound similar or arrive in bulk. Device recognition blocks stories that are posted repeatedly from the same device (be it through multiple SIM cards or fake user profiles).
Each of these checks are run 24×7 on all the Practo profiles, so that all the patient stories can be verified.
- Verification
- One story per patient per doctor
Each patient can submit only one story for a particular doctor. This can be edited overtime to make it more exhaustive or reflect a change of opinion. - Blurring unnecessary information
To avoid misleading other patients with glorifying statements or unnecessary comments, our system also blurs certain parts of the story, keeping the useful and necessary information intact. Read more about this.
How you can contribute successfully
If you had shared a patient story on Practo that wasn’t published, then here’s a simple way to revise it.
On Practo, every opinion counts. We urge all patients to share their experiences — good or bad, with medical practitioners or establishments. The one and only criterion is to bear in mind that the intent of the story must always be to help those in need make a well-informed decision.
Some statistics around patient stories on Practo
Within 48 hours, 94% patient stories are published
Of all the doctors who have patients stories on their profiles, 38% have negative recommendations.
97.7% negative comments are published on practo.com
