Reporting of patient experience data on health systems’ websites and commercial physician-rating websites: Mixed-methods analysis

Abstract

Background: Some hospitals’ and health systems’ websites report physician-level ratings and comments drawn from the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems surveys. Objective: The aim was to examine the prevalence and content of health system websites reporting these data and compare narratives from these sites to narratives from commercial physician-rating sites. Methods: We identified health system websites active between June 1 and 30, 2016, that posted clinician reviews. For 140 randomly selected clinicians, we extracted the number of star ratings and narrative comments. We conducted a qualitative analysis of a random sample of these physicians’ narrative reviews and compared these to a random sample of reviews from commercial physician-rating websites. We described composite quantitative scores for sampled physicians and compared the frequency of themes between reviews drawn from health systems’ and commercial physician-rating websites. Results: We identified 42 health systems that published composite star ratings (42/42, 100%) or narratives (33/42, 79%). Most (27/42, 64%) stated that they excluded narratives deemed offensive. Of 140 clinicians, the majority had composite scores listed (star ratings: 122/140, 87.1%; narrative reviews: 114/140, 81.4%), with medians of 110 star ratings (IQR 42-175) and 25.5 (IQR 13-48) narratives. The rating median was 4.8 (IQR 4.7-4.9) out of five stars, and no clinician had a score less than 4.2. Compared to commercial physician-rating websites, we found significantly fewer negative comments on health system websites (35.5%, 76/214 vs 12.8%, 72/561, respectively; P