@ess77 I think the larger hospitals actually do have better patient service than the local ones. I am in southern NH and people assume that the hospitals in Boston are impersonal but I have found just the opposite to be true. My doctors at Mass General seem genuinely caring and responsive.

I found my new PCP with recommendations from a couple of people, plus a magazine up here, NH Magazine, has doctor ratings once a year and she was well rated there and on the online doctor rating sites. I only believe the online sites if there are enough individual reviews to be a good sampling. If there are five or less I figure that they can too easily be skewed.

My new PCP was one I was considering when I chose the PCP I had. I had three doctors under consideration and she was one of them. I had a few women PCPs before that and they seemed less interested in their patients, I believe their family involvement with their children took a strong priority and their patients came in a distant second. For that reason, I chose to go with the man. I think the woman I am currently seeing is not married so that would not be the case. I have to admit, the man I was going to was very caring and when I was struggling pre-transplant he often called me to see how I was doing and he kept track of me all the time. The two things I had against him though were dropping the ball on my osteoporosis, and long before that, not diagnosing my cirrhosis. I was sent to a neurologist because they thought one of my symptoms was neurological and he was the one who said he thought the problem was my liver! Had it not been for him I don't know how much longer it would have taken to get a diagnosis. At that point, it had been 16 months.

Good luck finding a new PCP, it is not easy, and around here, generally speaking the really good ones are not taking new patients.
JK