How we rank doctors

Type of doctor, distance from your zip code, insurance, accepting new patients, telehealth and board certification each remove doctors who do not match. For insurance, an exact plan keeps only doctors the insurer’s own directory lists in that plan; a company alone keeps doctors in any of its plans or with the company listed on Healthgrades. Insurance never changes the score. A procedure limits the list to the types of doctor who do it, and a condition such as hives limits it to the type of doctor who treats it.

Each part is a number from 0 to 1, multiplied by its weight. The weights in each column add up to 100.

• Procedure volume: where the doctor falls among Houston doctors of the same specialty who billed Medicare for that procedure (a percentile). If fewer than 5 Houston doctors do it, each doctor who does gets 0.5. A doctor with no Medicare volume for it gets 0. Medicare data covers Medicare patients only, and CMS hides counts under 11.
• Review strength: explained below.
• Credentials: 1 when a board certification is listed (on Healthgrades, or in the American Board of Allergy and Immunology lookup), 0.5 when we did not find one.
• Accepting new patients: 1 for yes, 0.5 when unknown, 0 for no, as listed on Healthgrades or WebMD.
• Distance: 1 at 0 miles, falling evenly to 0 at the distance you chose, measured to the doctor’s closest office. With no zip code every doctor gets 0.5, so distance does not change the order.

1. We pool the star ratings from Healthgrades and WebMD. Each site’s average counts in proportion to its number of star ratings.
2. We add 10 ratings’ worth of the Houston average for the doctor’s specialty, so a few ratings cannot outweigh many. Today that average is 4.58 stars for ENTs (15,087 ratings) and 4.44 for allergists (2,107 ratings).
3. Adjusted stars = (pooled stars × number of ratings + Houston average × 10) ÷ (number of ratings + 10).
4. Review strength = (adjusted stars − 1) ÷ 4, so 1 star is 0 and 5 stars is 1.

Example for two ENTs: 5.0 stars from 2 ratings adjusts to 4.65, while 4.8 stars from 109 ratings adjusts to 4.78, so the doctor with 109 ratings scores higher on reviews. A doctor with no ratings gets exactly the Houston average.

A patient may rate the same doctor on both sites; we cannot tell, so both ratings count. Our topic analysis of review text (communication, wait time and so on) is shown on profiles but is not part of the score.

Doctors with the same score are ordered by number of star ratings (more first), then by last name.

Payments from drug and device companies, hospital star ratings, Texas license details and Medicare quality scores are on each doctor’s page so you can weigh them yourself. They do not change the order.

• CMS Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners by Provider and Service: procedure volume
• Healthgrades: star ratings, accepting new patients, board certification and insurance lists
• WebMD Care: star ratings and accepting new patients
• American Board of Allergy and Immunology: board certification for allergists
• CMS Doctors and Clinicians: which doctors are listed, their offices and telehealth
• NPI Registry: doctors missing from the CMS list and office addresses
• US Census Bureau geocoder and ZCTA gazetteer: office positions for distance and the map; approximate positions use the center of the zip code
• OpenFreeMap and OpenStreetMap: the map itself (no tracking)

Data last updated Nov 2026.