The Best Doctors organization contacts all currently elected physicians, including many department heads, at major teaching hospitals, and asks them to rate specialists outside their own facilities. Their process of peer review requires every listed physician be reevaluated with each new survey. With person-to-person telephone interviews and proprietary polling and balloting software, they collect up to 1.5 million evaluations annually. Only 5% of the doctors in any country are actually selected to become Best Doctors.
Peer-to-peer surveys identify specialists who are considered by fellow physicians to be the most skilled in their fields and most qualified for reviewing and treating complex medical conditions.
The polling process is anonymous and confidential, qualitative and quantitative. It provides detailed profiles of each physician, including his or her practice, research programs and diagnostic and treatment procedures. Doctors in more than 400 subspecialties of medicine are surveyed.
Doctors do not pay to be included in the database, nor are they paid to participate in the survey. The judgment of peers is the determining factor.