Online Patient Reviews of Physicians Pulled from Patient Satisfaction Data

by Sheryl S. Jackson

Automating Process Reduces Need for Staff and Saves Advertising Dollars

When the University of Utah Health Care added physician ratings to its website (as detailed in the May 2013 issue of eHST) to combat the less reliable results found on rating sites such as Yelp, Healthgrades, or RateMDs, Matt Gove was interested. The chief marketing officer and senior vice president, external affairs, at Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta, Gove liked the idea of using Piedmont’s Press Ganey patient satisfaction data to bolster the health system’s online physician profiles and drive more patients to Piedmont providers.

“I admire what Utah did, but I couldn’t justify the resources, in terms of cost and manpower, required to implement and maintain the program in my organization,” says Gove. Because increased transparency is a value of his organization, Gove kept looking for a way to use data owned by the hospital to improve the organization’s online presence.

A conversation with a healthcare information technology company at a conference, in which Gove described what he wanted to do, led to the development of a product that enables Piedmont to publish patient satisfaction information directly to physician profiles on the health system site.

Although the original product from Digital Assent, called PatientPad, is designed to collect time-of-service patient reviews in a physician practice for use in online media, the company worked with Piedmont to create a solution that automatically pulls physician-specific data and comments from Press Ganey data and publishes ratings based on data on the physician’s profile. Patient comments are also extracted and placed in a queue for hospital staff to review before publication.

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