How can we promote corporate wellness without a guide - an accurate and impartial one - that enables us to distinguish between alleged experts and actual ones? How can employers encourage employees to make good health a priority, when there is little or no information about the best caregivers? How can we trust what we read, and know what we should read if there is an absence of trust involving the sites we visit or the content we share?
These questions speak to the challenges of the healthcare industry in general and the problems confronting the cause of corporate wellness in particular. For there is a need, an urgent and invaluable one, to have a review site that is independent, comprehensive and secure; a site not only for doctors and patients, but a site for all current and prospective patients; a site not only for the medical profession, but a site for every profession; a site that is a true meritocracy, free of interference from advertisers and immune from tampering of any kind; a site, in short, that is as transparent as it is transformational.
I emphasize these points because of too many review sites - including those with a focus on healthcare - lack the features described above. They may have some of these features or seek to emulate some of the benefits of some of these features, but they do not have a sufficiently strong reputation to improve healthcare and advance the goals of corporate wellness. Without such a site, people have to do too much work - they have to spend too much time online, evaluating (more by instinct than hard intelligence) one hospital versus another, one specialist's skills versus another, one insurer's veracity versus another's apparent lack thereof.
This is not something the public should have to do. Nor is it something that will enhance peace of mind, because the more these sites differ - the more glaring the gap between one site's adulation of a doctor and another's attack against his very right to practice medicine - the less likely anyone is to read them, never mind trust them. The good news is that there is a solution to this dilemma.
Witness the rise of Completed.com, a review site that is a meritocracy. Witness, too, the rise of a complete review site that avoids conflicts of interest, that uses sunlight, so to speak, as the disinfectant against lies and attempted falsehoods; that is the antidote to the forces of deception, rumor and innuendo. I exaggerate not in the slightest about these things, since I know how critical it is to have - and how timely it is to offer - a review site that no hacker can destroy, no propagandist can distort, no publicist can dismiss.
With the information necessary to choose the right doctor, nurse or nutritionist, with the freedom to choose based on facts instead of the work of fabulists, with everything so easily accessible -- with all of these things at our disposal, we can make corporate wellness a reality nationwide. That result deserves a five-star review.
About the Author
Lewis Fein writes about a variety of health and wellness issues, in addition to pieces about technology, business, and management. Based in Southern California, you may email him at feinlewis@gmail.com
