Yay!  I found a GREAT site that allows us patients to rate our dialysis center!  I’ve threatened for a couple years to develop a website where WE, the Patients, can provide some feedback about our centers and HERE it is!  Finally a place where we can have our say.

You must rate the center with 1 to 5 stars, create a headline, then you can fill out a free-form description with your review, and finally there are rating stars (1-5) for doctor communication, helpfulness of staff, and treatment effectiveness.  Unfortunately there are no definitions of those terms.  I assume “doctor communication” is the quality of how your doctor communicates with you and listens to what you’re saying. “Helpfulness of Staff” must mean the quality of the staff helping you with treatment, getting set up, coming off dialysis, etc.   And, “treatment effectiveness” must mean the quality of the dialysis but that is really vague. Does that mean the effectiveness of the staff and doctor treatment?  The URL?  You’ll have to figure that one out for yourself.  Leave a comment if you have some ideas.  I’m at a loss to define that one.

To write a review, you must sign in with a Facebook, Google+, or an email account.  This is the only problem.  There’s not a way to post your review anonymously so some people may not want everyone to know who wrote the review.  If you love everything about your center or don’t have anything bad to say about it, this could be the place.  However, if you have some juicy stuff to post, you may have to by-pass the regular login part by creating an email account for this purpose or use an email no one else knows about.  In other words, go to an email service and create an email account for just this purpose so you can be completely honest and anonymous.

But the good part overall is we have a place to review our particular center and let people know the real story of what’s going on at dialysis centers, the good, the bad and the ugly.  Be as honest as you can.

When you access the listings of dialysis centers, in general, there will be a numeric overall rating.  If you click on the “what’s this?”, it will give you a description of how this rating is achieved and a pie chart of the parts of the rating.  The “smart rating” is the average of Dialysis Adequacy, Total Performance Score, Anemia Management, and Hospitalizations and Death as they have been reported to CMS/Medicare. From this, they calculate an overall ‘smart Rating”.  My current center has a rating of 86.  Pretty good, I’d say.  My previous center, which I often refer to as “The Center from Hell” has a rating of 57.  I’m not surprised!

You can access the site by CLICKING HERE.  Good luck!

As a note, FindTheBest.com has hundreds of other categories so you can use it to find almost anything, even durable meds like scooters, blood pressure monitors.  So, if you have a mind to, provide a rating for most everything!  Have Fun!