Do you know if your hospital has a good reputation? Yelp can tell you if you are curious, and growing numbers of health care consumers are looking. That has created both a problem and an opportunity for hospitals. To begin with, let’s establish a framework of information. Patient experience is critical in a number of ways. For starters, happier patients are typically healthier, as a report published in Academic Medicine found. So hospitals care about delivering high quality care and helping the recipient of that care to feel good about the process. But there are compelling business reasons for hospitals to care about the issue as well. Hospitals can be penalized on their Medicare payments by as much as 2% for poor reviews from patients on a standardized exit survey. That can reflect a substantial sum of money to a hospital, as do the Medicare bonuses if they achieve high scores on those reviews. Hospitals also have to face the music in the age of the internet where consumers have unprecedented power in guiding other consumers to make informed decisions. In the healthcare space, that translates beyond review sites like Yelp to forums and medical-specific sites dedicated to ranking doctors, hospitals, and other medical services. “Healthcare providers understand that patients are customers, and customers can take their business elsewhere if they are unhappy about any aspect of their experience,” explains HealthLeaders Media. “To keep patients, and thus reimbursement, coming in the door, hospitals must focus on achieving strong patient satisfaction… [Read full story]
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