The newest addition on the Yelp web site is reviews of hospitals, nursing homes, and doctors.
Yelp has teamed up to do the reviews with ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that provides investigative journalism. Yelp will post information from ProPublica’s interactive health databases on its health provider pages. The information offered is consumers’ experiences, including average wait times. The data come from the CMS.
These reviews put hospitals in a position to learn a lesson hotels and restaurants picked up a long time ago: Customer service matters, perhaps more than anything else. ProPublica reports that when people are unhappy about their service, they complain. But the good news is that most patients are happy. There are many more five-star ratings than one-star ones among healthcare providers. Four stars is the average.
Focus on the areas patients are likely to complain about: long wait times, difficulty getting an appointment, billing errors, and customer service, according to the blog @HospitalReport, published by AHC Media, which also publishes Hospital Access Management. (For more information on this topic, see “Want satisfaction scores to soar? Simple solutions give big results,” HAM, August 2015.)
