www.healthgrades.com promotes themself as a website where you can get both free informatiion and reports for a fee on physicians, hospitals and nursing homes. It is a site that I have followed now for a few years, since I work in the healthcare industry as a consultant and I have purchased a few reports on a few physicians over the past 2 years.
The overall quality of these physician background reports, at best, has been inconsistent and at worst, completely devoid of vital information. When I called their customer service department and attempted to complain about the lack of information in the report and to ask for my money back, they reluctantly said they would refund my money. I sort of felt sorry for the customer service representative, he was trying his best to be polite and professional, despite my hostility and anger over the situation.
A word of warning to consumers who are contemplating purchasing a physician report from this website - don't! They have in the last few months implemented this "upsell sales tactic", for lack of a better way to describe it. Whenever you purchase a physician report for $12.95, they automatically and deceptively attached this service they call "Watchdog Notification Service" for a monthly charge of $9.95/month, every month until you notice the charge on your credit card statement and call customer service to complain about it. Now, I will admit, I understand how internet sales and marketing works and Healthgrades gives you this "canned speel" about how everyone does it and it's not illegal and how it is indicated in 3 different places in the "small print" on their website, somehow rationalizing their, at best, deceptive sales practices, and at worst, fraudulent sales tactics.
The truely sad part of this whole situation is that the target population for their website (understanding the healthcare industry as I do) is senior citizens, many of which are on fixed incomes, and understanding the way most people are, the majority of their customers who are getting caught up in this scam are either not realizing they are being charged every month for something they didn't request until they have received 2 or 3 charges of $9.95 or they are not realizing it at all until either their credit card company intervenes by notifying them of the potentially fraudulent charges (based on complaints from other customers about HealthGrades) or their credit card simply expires, stopping the charges by default. Unfortunately, companies like HealthGrades understand this all too well.