The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports on a new website, theHealthcareScoop.com, that makes picking a doctor or a clinic more like shopping for a book on Amazon.com or an LCD computer monitor on Newegg.com.

A number of online storefronts, like Amazon and Newegg, allow customers to post reviews of their products; shoppers can read through these reviews to get a sense of other customers experiences with the product. Similarly, theHealthcareScoop.com, created by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, allows patients to post reviews of a particular doctor, clinic or hospital.

The website is trying to meet the needs of health care consumers looking for quality information. Currently, consumers are limited to word-of-mouth advice, surveys of doctors (often criticized as popularity contests), and websites that report quality based on evidence-based metrics, like whether a doctor used beta-blocker treatment after a heart attack. The websites reporting quality information often only offer a star-based rating for providers, like they were some restaurant.

While I would never make a life and death health care decision based on an anonymous post to theHealthcareScoop.com, a number of health care decisions are not life and death and the website should prove to be quite useful. In my experience, once you get a critical mass of reviews for a product at an online retailer, say 30 or 40 reviews, you begin to be able to discern trends within the product being reviewed. For instance (and this is purely hypothetical), if you’re shopping for a Motorola KRZR cell phone and about half the posted reviews at Amazon mention poor reception, then you’ve got some good information that reception might not be the best on a KRZR. Likewise, if a critical mass of reviews exist for a clinic and a good portion of them mention long wait times, then that clinic might not be well managed.

Granted, none of this information is scientific and it all relies on the subjective feelings of only those customers who felt the impulse to post their comments, but that information is certainly better than none. I certainly prefer having Amazon reviews to no reviews.