Online reviews of healthcare providers on social media sites such as Yelp are catching key patient data points and comments more standardized and formal hospital surveys most likely are missing, say researchers from Penn Medicine.

More importantly, healthcare providers need to do a better job of taking those word-of-mouth comments and reviews to heart and acting on them, says Dr. Raina Merchant, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn social media and health innovation lab.

Formal patient surveys are a big deal for hospitals. Each year hospitals that are paid by Medicare must participate in the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, a national, standardized and publicly reported survey of patients’ perspectives of hospital care. During and after their stay at a given hospital where the bill is all or partially paid for by Medicare, the hospital asks patients to fill out a detailed satisfaction survey across multiple categories that range from the cleanliness of the hospital room to how well doctors and nurses communicated care.

Depending upon the survey outcome, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services can penalize hospitals with low scores financially. The federal government uses the scores of the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey as part of its rating system for how patients meet or fail Medicare standards for outcomes-based quality of care.

But for all of the information hospitals are collecting via formal surveys, equally important is listeningand actingon the comments consumers as patients are posting on Yelp and other social media outlets, Merchant says.

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Each month, more than 80 million users read and write reviews on Yelp, say Penn Medicine researchers. Of those, roughly 42,000 describe U.S. hospital experiences, with most comments addressing patient experience issues such as parking, the cafeteria, wait times, and navigating the facility.

But results of a recent study of more than 16,000 Yelp reviews by Penn Medicine about U.S. hospitals showed many of these key services are not captured by standardized quality surveys.

The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey measures impressions of 11 different domains, including discharge information and the overall hospital environment.

But Penn Medicine researchers say the content contained in Yelp comments could be organized into an additional 12 areas, including amenities, compassion of staff, and family member care, an area Penn Medicine researchers say addresses an influential group often overlooked by service providersfamily and friends.

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Most organized approaches to evaluating care focus specifically on the patient, but many online reviews seem to include either input from or focus on caregivers, friends, family and others who are often bypassed by formalized surveys, says Dr. David Asch, a professor of medicine and medical ethics and health policy and director of the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation. Family members and friends are powerful advocates for vulnerable patients and also experience health services and shape patient perceptions of it. Incorporating these insights from reviews on Yelp and other consumer review platforms can be a powerful differentiator for a business.

While health professionals look for ways to use online platforms to deliver messages to patients, its also important to recognize that the internet is a two-way street, where patients are also sharing important ideas, Merchant says.

“Reviews posted to sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor are the modern-day version of word-of-mouth testimonials, providing insight into millions of consumer experiences that are not only influential to other consumers, but can and should be influential to service providers, Merchant says. Its understandable that in a high-stakes setting like health care, providers may be concerned about these reviews not accurately describing parts of care visible or only understood by other care professionals, but while we cannot control how these platforms operate, what we can do is take stock of what the reviewers are saying and find ways to make them feel like their concerns or questions are heard.

 

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