Return to Virginia Business - January 2003

Best Doctors in Virginia
A third party rates Virginia’s “best doctors.” You be the judge.

The following four pages represent Virginia physicians who have been named to the Best Doctors in America® list. The list is taken from a national database of more than 30,000 physicians in more than 40 specialties. For this issue, we chose five specialties that might be of interest to our readers.

Best Doctors in Virginia

Best Doctors is an independent company that employs a combination of high technology polling and person-to-person telephone interviews in which doctors are asked to rate the clinical skills of their peers.

Nominees are added to a voting pool for consideration by other doctors within the same specialty of medicine or the same geographic area. Proprietary software enables Best Doctors to fax customized ballots to each of the doctors in the voting pool. Ballots change daily as responses are returned and recorded. The entire process is supplemented with in-depth telephone interviews that allow poll takers to ask probing questions about a physician's practice and allows the doctors to comment more candidly.

All voting is strictly confidential and doctors are not notified of their inclusion on the list until after the survey process is complete. Unlike other “best” lists, doctors cannot pay to be listed.

Surveys of the medical profession are complex and time-consuming, often being done by part-time stringers working on a fixed budget and tight schedule. Best Doctors’ staff works year-round, at a cost of more than $1 million annually, surveying and interviewing thousands of physicians to develop and refine the list. The following list is not based on outcome studies or mortality rates, which normally do not take into account the severity of the cases. The best doctors often handle the most difficult and life-threatening cases that other doctors have refused to treat or have treated without success.

We hope you find the following information informative and useful. If you have a comment or question, feel free to contact the publisher at dforshey@va-business.com.

 

Return to Virginia Business - January 2003