Lawyer Rating Service Avvo Expands to Include Doctors
The controversial lawyer ratings website Avvo has taken on a new challenge.
Today Avvo announced that it has launched a doctor-ratings directory that will offer information on physicians’ backgrounds, experience and disciplinary records. Avvo already rates lawyers on a 1-to-10 scale and includes their disciplinary sanctions.
“Yes, it’s true,” Avvo CEO Mark Britton writes at the Avvo blog. “This morning we entered a new era by launching a doctor ratings directory, medical Q&A forum and hundreds of Health Guides.”
The directory has 800,000 doctor profiles covering 90 percent of the country’s licensed physicians, according to a press release. Avvo was slower to reach that kind of saturation for its lawyer ratings. The company was launched in 2007, and announced this April that it has finally grown to cover lawyers in all 50 states.
Britton cautions at the Avvo blog that the doctor’s service is in “beta release meaning we are still smoothing off some of the rough edges.” So far the site has searched for misconduct information for about half of the listed doctors and posted its findings. “Like bar associations, state medical boards do not always have the systems to get us information as quickly as we would like,” Britton explains.
At least two lawyers have sued Avvo over their lawyer ratings, including Larry Joe Davis Jr., a board-certified health lawyer in Florida who says he was wrongly listed as a labor and employment lawyer on the website.
