Dentist Who 'Invoiced' Patient For Negative Reviews, Getting Slammed On Yelp
from the these-things-have-a-way-of-coming-back dept
You may recall that, yesterday, we wrote about the class action lawsuit filed against dentist Stacy Makhnevich. Makhnevich used ethically and legally dubious forms from the organization Medical Justice, to demand the future copyrights on any reviews a patient might write about her. Then, she used the DMCA process to try to take down negative reviews on Yelp and DoctorBase. When that didn't work, she threatened the patient, Robert Lee, with a lawsuit, and started sending him invoices for infringement, at $100/day. None of this addressed Lee's original complaint -- that Makhnevich failed to submit the documents he needed to get reimbursed from his insurance company for an expensive procedure.Of course, as with any typical Streisand Effect situation, all this ended up doing is leading to a hell of a lot more attention to the situation and the negative comments. But, these days, things can go even further than just driving more attention to content someone wanted disappeared. It can lead to even further backlash -- especially on sites involving reviews -- as we've seen with authors who get dinged for questionable actions. If you go take a look at Yelp's page for Stacy Makhnevich the one star reviews are flowing in... many of them calling her out for what she did. Oh, and Robert Lee's review, which kicked this whole mess off... is Yelp's "featured" review at the top of the page. Her current total review rating is at a star and a half. It used to be much, much better.
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Filed Under: class action, copyright, dentists, dmca, doctors, reviews, stacy makhnevich
Companies: medical justice
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I don't know if people get the whole "Streisand Effect" and more people are learning the hard way. I don't have anything against this dentist but if this is how you treat your customers then good luck getting customers.
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Response to: Andrew on Dec 2nd, 2011 @ 6:35am
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Re: Response to: Andrew on Dec 2nd, 2011 @ 6:35am
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here's the real point of the issue
instead of going to the disgruntle patient and trying to resolve the situation, she started swinging legal muscle, working to remove the legitimate review and trying to intimidate the disgruntled patient. This is just bad behavior, and it doesn't matter what series of steps lead to that, this was not the correct response for her to take.
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She is going to have no idea what hit her.
Hopefully she is a decent singer, because I think she is most likely done as a doctor.
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Re: Or...
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Lobo Santo = Saint Wolf
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drill baby drill
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"Dr. Makhnevich is the Classical Singer Dentist of New York, a professional who provides high quality dentistry for musicians as well as the general public. A professional opera singer (you can listen to the famous “La Boheme” aria by clicking on this link) as well as a renowned stomatologist, she combines her extensive training in dentistry with her musical experience to cater to the very delicate needs of musicians, especially wind instruments musicians and classical singers."
ROFLMAO
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Never use a Dentist who pimps her upcoming CD sales on her business website.
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Then she managed to not submit the paperwork to the right insurance company so he could be reimbursed.
Then when he asked for records to do it himself, she referred him to a company that wanted nearly $300 for the records, which seems to be a violation of the NY law about records requests.
I am guessing this his how she operates, and leaves the patient to deal with being out all of the cash and trying to get anything back for what should have been covered in the first place.
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She doesn't strike me as someone who thinks things through and just likes to get paid.
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Excerpts from the NYSDA "Principles of Ethics and Code of Professional Conduct" Page 5:
"1-B. Patient Records. Patients are entitled to copies of their records.
On receipt of a patient’s written request, a
dentist must provide her/him with copies of all pertinent
records including radiographs, except as otherwise provided by state law.
The confidentiality of patient records must be maintained."
"4. A dentist shall not withhold copies of records from
patients based on the patient owing any balance to the
dentist or the patient not paying any copying charges. A
dentist may charge a fee for copying patient records, but
shall not charge more than the actual cost of copying, and
shall never charge more than 75 cents per page for paper
copies, in accordance with state law."
http://www.nysdental.org/img/document_files/code_of_ethics2010.pdf
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"3. Copies of records shall be provided by dentists to patients
within a reasonable time, not to exceed ten days from the
date of a patient’s written request."
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and suing customers will backfire in an even worse way. serves you right! you deserve to lose all customers with the attitude you have and the respect you dont have for your patients
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Oddly enough, suing would have been a more honorable route.
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posted on yelp.
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Yeah I think her Yelp rep being trashed is hardly enough.
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Why doesn't she just pay Yelp to take down the reviews?
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Show the Graph
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1) Always do the right thing, take proper care of your customers, provide a solid, reliable quality service and be friendly and professional.
2) Pitch a fit when people say anything even slightly bad about you, throw the full weight of the law at them in an attempt to bury both them and their freedom of expression, seek gag orders in court and spend enormous sums on lawsuits seeking judgments the target will never be able to pay you.
#1 is a lot cheaper and easier, but for some reason, most large companies go for #2 these days. More and more small businesses seem to be following the big companies lead. I get the distinct impression there was a run of very bad business model consultants somewhere, that somehow became viewed as the best in the business. So when the consultant(s) gave bad advice, every company followed it...and even though bad service has provable bad results, the companies are now in an Emperor's New Clothes situation, having spent fortunes for the bad advice.
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Happy customers make a company a LOT more money, especially in the long term, than unhappy ones.
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Pristine as in 100% good, because that is impossible, you can get pass the 60% mark and call it pristine, the higher it goes the more difficult it becomes.
There will always be something outside of the control of oneself that will make it hard to achieve a 100% point over the fourth dimension(aka time).
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Yelp solution
We have recently implemented a system to outsmart yelp from hiding our filtered reviews.
The technique below has worked VERY WELL for us and some of the other budinesses who have already done what we have.
*** this works best for retailers, not restaurants***
Step 1- first of all, if you’re currently advertising with yelp, stop doing so and shift that money to optimize your own web site for keywords that people will search for instead.
Step 2- Have a graphic designer make a yelp badge that is placed on your web site. It should say “we have …… filtered and unfiltered reviews on yelp”.
Step 3- When a visitor clicks on the yelp badge, it will go to another page ON YOUR OWN WEB SITE (instead of going to yelp’s. (why help them get traffic and rank higher on google anyways)?
Step 4- On this page have your graphic designer get a screen capture (picture) of all your filtered and unfiltered reviews and have them pasted together onto one page.
Now, all your reviews (filtered or not) will be visible to all your web site visitors.
5- put a note on the top that says, “for your convenience we have placed all our filtered and unfiltered reviews on one page to see. If you’d like to go to our live yelp page, click here …………”
Make the whole page clickable to your live yelp page so no-one will think you’re trying hide something or to be dishonest
Advantages of doing this:
1- Your visitors will stay on your web site instead of being directed to yelp’s
2- Your visitors can’t click on your competitors
3- No more being a slave to yelp’s algorithm/filtering
4- Yelp would not benefit from getting traffic from you and higher rankings on google
5- This whole process cost us less than $150 to implement
This technique WILL NOT work for your business if your web site is not SEO optimized.
Just be sure to shift that $300 per month on yelp advertising and put it into KEYWORDS that people will search for.
Please pass this along
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If they had just submitted it to the insurance company, or sent me the records to do it myself, and I got reimbursed $200 or whatever I would have just said "Boy did I get screwed." and that would have been the end of it. I still can't comprehend what the hell they were thinking.
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