Tag: Yelp

Uncle Sam, Yelped

Sep 23, 2015• 2

By NIAM YARAGHI

Yelp recently announced it had reached an agreement with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) to allow agencies to claim their pages and read and respond to reviews. This is yet another move by the current administration to become more transparent and effectively communicate with the public through new information technology opportunities. I believe transparency almost always leads to net positive outcomes and thus have been a fierce supporter of government’s efforts towards this end. However, creating Yelp pages for government agencies may not be the best way to increase transparency and communicate with the public.

You may not like the policy, but you should love the way the GSA is implementing it. Rather than spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money to create a dedicated website, which would have most likely faced the same challenges of Healthcare.gov, GSA decided to take advantage of the reliable, readily available and, most importantly, free platform offered by Yelp. While the benefits of this policy are yet to be shown, at least its implementation cost is very minimal.

The feedback provided through Yelp can potentially help the administration to assess the current level of quality its services at different locations and potentially monitor the effectiveness of its improvement policies.

Really? Online Reviews Could Help Fix Medicine

Jun 3, 2014• 4

By Thomas Lee, MD

A basic principle of health care is that everyone strongly favors transparency – for everyone but themselves.

“Sunshine is the strongest disinfectant” is the oft-used expression that supports putting information out in the open for all to see. That said, every stakeholder in health care gets a bit nervous about exposing their own data.

They are quick to cite the potential downsides – that patients will not be able to understand the limitations of the information, that risk adjustment will be inadequate to explain why their performance looks below average, that they may actually be below average.

No one gets as nervous about public reporting as my health care provider colleagues. We worry that everyone else may game the system, cherry-pick patients, or that we might lose patients if the data look less than perfect. It’s safe to say that number of physicians who hate the idea of public reporting is greater than the number who support it.

All of which makes it that much more fascinating that some provider organizations have recently begun putting all their patient experience data – including every patient comment about every doctor – on their Find-A-Doctor web sites. “Every” actually does mean every – the good, bad, and ugly (after removal of those that might violate patient confidentiality). And they are tied directly to the physician who delivered their care.

Why would they do this? The initial response from some commentators was that they were trying to “out-Yelp Yelp” – that is, control the information that was appearing about them on the Web. In truth, the initial idea was less about controlling information than providing more of it.

Rather than living with on-line comments generated by a small subset of patients motivated by who-knows-what to write in, organizations like the University of Utah decided that they would survey all patients electronically, and post all their comments.

And they would take the chance that more data would provide a better sense of the truth.

The University of Utah health care system was the first in the country to go down this road, and they were rewarded for their creativity and courage with a very pleasant surprise. The result over the last few years has been astounding improvement in their patients’ experience with their physicians.

The Patient Will Rate You Now

Mar 19, 2012• 20

By Bob Wachter, MD

These days, I’d never consider trying a new restaurant or hotel without reading the on-line ratings on TripAdvisor or Yelp. I seldom even bother with professional restaurant or travel critics.

Until recently, there was little patient-generated information about doctors, practices or hospitals to help inform patient decisions. But that is rapidly changing, and the results may be every bit as transformative as they have been in traditionally consumer-centric industries like hospitality. Medicine has never thought much of the wisdom of crowds, but the times, as the song goes, they are a-changin’.

Even if one embraces the value of listening to the patient, several questions arise. Should we care about the patient’s voice because of its inherent value, or because it can tell us something important about other dimensions of quality? How best should patient judgments be collected and disseminated – through formal surveys or that electronic scrum known as the Internet? And what are some of the unanticipated or negative consequences of measuring patient satisfaction and experience? All of these questions are being debated actively, and some newly published data adds to the mix.

Traditional Surveys

For the past few years, Medicare has been administering the HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) survey to a random sample of 300-1000 patients discharged from every U.S. hospital. Results are now posted on Medicare’s Hospital Compare website. Starting in late 2012, hospital payments will be on the line, as part of Medicare’s pay-for-performance program, known as “Value-based Purchasing” (VBP).