Reference Question of the Week - 8/10/08

One difficult question I get occasionally is “do you have rankings for doctor/lawyers?”

I think what people are expecting is a Consumer Reports-like ranking of these two professions, but unfortunately, we don’t have anything exactly like that. We do have some resources for doctors, but lawyers are different.

A patron asked me to help her find lawyer rankings this past week. I did find a few websites showing some rankings, but I had no idea how reliable any of them were, and none of them got down to the local level needed by a patron in a small public library. Another thing I found were lots of articles talking about lawyers suing websites about their rankings, so that might explain the scarcity of resources.

In the end, two resources appeared promising, but only one ended up helping:

• The American Bar Association has a Lawyer Locater, which is powered by martindale.com and LexisNexis. It does provide some information on a lawyer’s background, including the Martindale-Hubbell peer review rating from their Law Directory. The amount of information varies by lawyer, but in this case, the lawyer my patron was looking for wasn’t listed at all
• The Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers provides an attorney status report which, while it doesn’t rate lawyers, does indicate when the lawyer was admitted to the bar and if they’ve had any complaints against them (my patron was shocked to find out her lawyer was admitted to the bar just eight months ago)
• A third resource the patron left with was the phone number of the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Dial-A-Lawyer referral program, which assists private citizens in choosing legal council

Finding resources to research local doctors is slightly easier. This might be because the medical profession is more closely watched than the legal profession, or that people are more willing/able to travel for medical procedures than law suits.

One book I often turn to in our reference collection is America’s Top Doctors, which lists doctors by region, specialty, hospital, and by name.

Another nice local resource is the Boston Consumers’ Checkbook (which is also available for other cities). This magazine is similar to Consumer Reports, but instead of rating products, it rates services, including many medical services.

Part of the Mass.gov website reports on Health Care Quality and Cost Information. It includes lots of information for patients, but what I usually steer people towards are the “Volume by Surgeon and Hospital” reports - these aren’t rankings exactly, but instead show how often a doctor or hospital performs a certain procedure. Other reports also list cost and mortality rates for doctors and hospitals.

Another state-level website is the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine’s On-Line Physician Profile Site. Each profile includes general biographical information supplied by the doctor, and also has sections showing any malpractice payments made or any disciplinary and/or criminal actions taken against the doctor.

Additional web resources are:

• The American Medical Association’s doctor finder doesn’t provide rankings, but it does show contact and biographical information for both AMA members and non-members (it gives priority to members, it does list non-members if you click the right buttons)
• DrScore.com lets people score their own doctors and report on their experiences. Although the ratings are voluntary and anonymous, I did notice they indicate “Castle Connolly Top Doctors,” which is the America’s Top Doctor’s resource I mentioned above. And in addition to the ratings, this website is also useful as doctor finder
• RateMDs.com seems more commercial than DrScore.com, but it also seems to have more ratings and comments. This also has nice feature search for finding local doctors

I list these because they are free and useful, and accessible for my patrons. I’m sure there are many more not-free websites out there too, as well as additional good print resources. I’d appreciate hearing suggestions for more resources in the comments below - thanks.

See Also

• Zagat Doctor Reviews. Zagat?
• Reference Question of the Week - 1/17/09
• Reference Question of the Week - 9/13/09
• Reference Question of the Week - 1/11/09
• Library Investigation

Posted under Library, Reference Question, Resources | 2 Comments »

Reference Question of the Week - 3/23/08

Working with the public has good and bad aspects. Some of the best times I’ve had with patrons is when they take time out of their information seeking to just be a normal person. This is one of those times.

An obviously distressed woman approaches me at the desk. She says her son is a special-needs student at a school in a nearby community (she didn’t feel comfortable going to her hometown library with this), but she doesn’t feel like he’s getting the attention he requires. She has been going around and around with various school administrators, but they haven’t been cooperating with her efforts to find out just what is being provided for her son on a daily basis.

Someone told her that Chapter 766 of the State Laws addressed the public school system paying to send a special-needs kid to a private school, and she wanted me to help her find the actual text of this law.

Alright, that’s pretty straight-forward.

The General Laws of Massachusetts are online, so I went to this on the desk computer. We tried searching for “chapter 766,” but nothing came up. Then we tried a keyword search for “special education,” and that lead us to Chapter 71b - Children with Special Needs.

After a quick skim of the table of contents, the patron felt that what she needed must be here. She jotted down the URL and went to one of the public computers to continue her search for the chapter section that addresses private special education.

About a half an hour later, I stopped by her computer to see how she was doing. She was smiling as she read, but when I asked her if she was finding what she needed, she looked at me as if I had just caught her with her hand in the cookie jar.

Apparently, she sat down at the computer and typed in the address for the laws search, but instead of searching for “special education,” started searching for other things - like “blasphemy,” “exhibition” and others - just to see what funny laws Massachusetts had on the books.

And it has many. She and I clicked through and read quite a few, and a had a good time speculating what the origins of the laws were, the seemingly arbitrary penalties, and what kind of news it would make if they were enforced today. Our favorites were all under Chapter 272 - Crimes against Chastity, Morality, Decency and Good Order, and here are some highlights:

• Section 24. Keeping house of ill fame
• Section 34. Crime against nature
• Section 36. Blasphemy
• Section 80F. Giving away live animals as prize or award
• Of course, my personal favorite: Section 41. Disturbance of libraries

It was fun to just spontaneously enjoy something with a patron, rather than seeing her as someone to help and move on. And she seemed to really enjoy the diversion, too, as what she came in to research was fairly serious. So, yay for a good library experience.

See Also

• MA Open Source Info Session
• MA’s 2008 Statewide Ballot Question 1
• New Massachusetts Library Directory
• Reference Question of the Week - 6/28/09
• Reference Question of the Week - 2/3/08

Posted under Library, Reference Question, Resources | 3 Comments »