The popular restaurant guide has teamed up with Wellpoint to offer commentary on physicians. Tellingly, these new ratings will not be based on cost or quality but will center on the customer experience including trust, communications, availability and the office environment. As Wellpoint explains, the categories are “solely designed to reflect a consumer’s experience with a physician and not to reflect the quality of care they received.”

This guide will elevate doctor’s caring to the same level as the doctor’s care. Physicians, who are assumed to deliver high quality outcomes, will now be expected to do so in an accessible and customer-focused environment.

This is a novel approach for health care. While ratings abound in today’s highly competitive marketplace, they typically focus on quality. And it is normally difficult to get information on an individual physician’s performance let alone his/her personality.

With this new Zagat book, physician ratings will be easy accessible to most consumers. And the ratings will move away from standardized reports to focus instead on the self-reported customer experience. To buyers who rely on blogs and customer’s ratings to purchase everything from books to stoves, this approach will intuitively make sense.

I have long believed that customer service is the key differentiator in health care. And now, customers will have the chance to evaluate service without any intermediaries. Bringing this concept to healthcare is a novel and welcome innovation.