Vimo.com is a relatively new Web 2.0 offering which is in the Consumer-directed healthcare space. Specifically, it gives pricing for medical procedures and allows users to rate physicians and hospitals.  For a heart month promotion (an to increase the number of ratings on the site), they are offering to donate $1 for each physician rating to the American Heart Association.  The amount of data pulled from various sources is impressive. Cost data by procedure including average price, negotiated price, whether the hospital is above or below the average. For physicians there are ratings but also integration with Google maps for location. Nice job overall.
My question is, what is the value of these ratings to consumers? Will consumers embrace this practice the way they have for consumer items? Or will these rating sites become places for complaints to be aired rather than the best physicians and hospitals to be spotlighted? The competition between rating sites (see for instance, Revolution Health) will be worth watching. Will there eventually be a site which aggregates comments from these rating sites?

Technorati: Consumer driven healthcare