Online healthcare reviews are increasing after the COVID pandemic

After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, online ratings of health care facilities dropped significantly and have yet to fully recover, according to a new analysis led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. More than half of reviews on the online platform Yelp are now negative, reversing the pre-COVID picture. The findings are published in today JAMA network opened.

“Online reviews can tell us information about the patient experience that traditional reporting metrics, such as hospital-administered patient experience surveys, may miss,” says the study’s lead author, Neil Sehgal, ME, an associate fellow at the Penn Leonard Davis Institute of Health. Economy. “These assessments can help hospitals understand in near real-time what matters most to patients and their support networks.”

By analyzing all reviews of healthcare facilities in the United States on the online platform Yelp, dated from 2014 through 2023, Sehgal, co-author Anish Agarwal, MD, an assistant professor of emergency medicine, and their team saw that the percentage of positive… the four- and five-star ratings fell from 54.3% before March 2020 (marked as the start of the COVID pandemic in the United States) to 47.9% then.

As of the second half of 2021, researchers found that positive reviews never exceeded 50%.

“We analyzed Yelp reviews from healthcare facilities across the country, including hospitals, urgent care centers, doctor’s offices and more,” says Sehgal. “Our analysis shows how public perception of healthcare changed after COVID-19. And with this information, healthcare professionals can hopefully work to improve what caused these opinions.”

Feedback ups and downs

In analyzing the reviews, the researchers used a language processing technique to identify the most common topics from the reviews, organize them into themes, and measure how they changed over time.

The themes that saw the biggest change in mentions between the pre- and post-COVID periods were “insurance and billing issues” and “customer service and staff behavior.”

One theme that was mentioned less in negative reviews following the arrival of COVID – and a renewed, heightened focus on hygiene: the cleanliness of the facilities.

Trends emerge along ethnic and geographic lines

Although positive reviews of healthcare facilities on Yelp as a whole declined over time, healthcare facilities in rural areas already had lower ratings at the start of the period studied, and the disparities widened after COVID hit. After the COVID-19 crisis, rural facilities were 23% less likely to have positive reviews, compared to health facilities in urban areas, where they were 7% less likely to have positive reviews.

When they looked at data on race, researchers found that health facilities in the sample of neighborhoods they analyzed that had a higher percentage of black or white residents were likely to experience a significant drop in positive ratings.

But when it came to areas with above-average Hispanic populations, facilities still saw a decline in positive ratings, although the declines were not as pronounced.

“Right now, we cannot understand what is driving these changes among different populations,” Agarwal said. “But this could help us think critically about what questions to ask next and how we can better deliver care across the country in the future.”

Researchers also identified ethnic correlations around the most commonly cited complaints. Reviews for facilities in areas with higher black and/or Hispanic populations were more likely to criticize “insurance and billing issues,” while facilities in areas with higher white populations were more likely to experience issues with “wait times.”

“Many of the themes have clear overlap but differ by geographic region, which is interesting and highlights a growing need for healthcare systems and facilities to be more targeted and attuned to the needs and opinions of their local communities,” said Agarwal.

In the future, the researchers hope to delve deeper into the content of the assessments to better understand how attitudes and opinions break down along socio-ethnographic lines, giving healthcare professionals better tools to discuss issues important to individuals and to to allay concerns.