By Corinne Ramey

Amid a Wild West of consumer-ratings sites, North Shore-LIJ Health System is one of only a few hospitals in the U.S. to take matters into its own hands.

The Long Island-based hospital network began posting online ratings of its doctors this week, making it the first such organization in the metropolitan area to do so, hospital officials said.

It joins hospitals such as the Cleveland Clinic, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Wake Forest Baptist Health, Stanford Health Care and Piedmont Healthcare. When University of Utah Health Care began posting ratings in 2012, it said it was the first hospital in the country to do so.

Hospitals say posting their own ratings increases transparency, provides useful information to patients and helps them compete in a marketplace dominated by commercial sites such as ZocDoc, Yelp, Vitals, Healthgrades and RateMDs.com, that, after all, are already publishing doctor ratings.

“We want to become the honest broker of information that we think you’ll find helpful,” said Ira Nash, senior vice president and executive director of North Shore-LIJ Medical Group, the hospital’s physician practice. “This is not a choice between getting rated and not getting rated. It’s a legitimate way of getting patients’ feedback in a free-for-all.”

For North Shore-LIJ, adding the ratings was a nearly two-year process of compiling data and convincing physicians that it was in their best interests, Dr. Nash said. In early 2014, doctors received individual scorecards with their ratings and, later that year, access to an internal ratings website.

On North Shore-LIJ’s site, patients rate doctors on a scale of one to five stars. Out of the 785 doctors rated, the lowest-rated one has 3.63 stars and the highest-rated has 4.93 stars. A rating is only automatically displayed if a doctor opts in or has been rated at least 30 times, which the hospital considers statistically significant.

The hospital doesn’t publish comments that are vulgar or are personal attacks, and doctors can appeal comments that they don’t consider valid.

Doctors have traditionally bristled at ratings websites, stating that strong patient-physician relationships are based on open communication and mutual respect, and that choosing a doctor is much more complicated than choosing a restaurant. Online opinions of physicians should be taken with a grain of salt, and should certainly not be a patient’s sole source of information when looking for a new physician.

Carl Reimers, a cardiologist at North Shore-LIJ’s Lenox Hill Hospital, called the ratings positive overall, though a double-edged sword.

“You need to create a good patient experience, and that’s good medicine,” Dr. Reimers said. But he also questioned whether the ratings, which come from patients who complete a survey, capture only a fraction of patient interactions in an unscientific way.

Most doctors’ online ratings are positive and studies show that consumers say doctor ratings influence their behavior, said David Hanauer, a professor at the University of Michigan Medical School who has studied online ratings.

Consumers, he said, “pick their televisions this way. They pick their cars this way. Why wouldn’t you want this information for doctors?”

While doctors listed on ZocDoc were initially anxious about reviews, they have since embraced them, said Oliver Kharraz, ZocDoc’s president and founder. Physicians pay $300 a month, or $3,000 a year, to be listed on the site, which also lets users book appointments, and was last week valued at $1.8 billion.

“There is still a feature to opt out of reviews,” said Dr. Kharraz, “but I’ll challenge you to find a doctor on ZocDoc who has that.”

Consumer-review website Yelp also displays doctor reviews and recently announced a partnership with the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, which will allow for Yelp to post government data on hospitals.

Luther Lowe, Yelp’s vice president of public policy, questioned whether a hospital could be an impartial host of its own reviews, particularly negative ones.

“In order for a review platform to have credibility among consumers and prospective patients, the medical service provider can’t be in the position of deciding which content is public or valid,” he said.

A North Shore-LIJ spokesman said it verifies that its reviews came from North Shore-LIJ patients, while other sites can’t ensure that the ratings come from reviewers who have actually seen the doctor.

Cleveland Clinic, a nonprofit health network based in Ohio, began posting online ratings in April. It went through a two-year process of addressing the fears and concerns of its doctors, said Adrienne Boissy, the hospital’s chief experience officer. The hospital has seen a 16% increase in views of its physicians’ profiles since the ratings launched.

Such ratings are a hot topic among hospital administrators nationwide, Dr. Boissy said.

“I’m getting inquiries from hospitals across the country, about what our experience has been,” she said. For hospitals nationwide, physician ratings, “are absolutely coming.”