One indication that hospital reviews are important and people should pay attention to them is that doctors and healthcare professionals dislike them and argue against their merits. While there will be outlier information that is not representative of reality, review systems can generally provide insight into what others have thought about a product or service. This is the case with all types of assessments including eBay purchases, hotel stays, and restaurants. In the health profession, although reviews may not suggest how good a surgeon is at performing his task, they can indicate how much a hospital or medical professional cares about patient perception and how patients are treated in general. In a profession where customer service is an afterthought and doctors are perceived as cold and pretentious, reviews are important.

A changing culture

Some studies show that customer satisfaction surveys and hospital feedback correlates with measures of quality that experts use to determine the level of care of hospitals. Furthermore, as illustrated in a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, although most reviews are positive, the way that hospital staff, doctors, and nurses treat patients will affect the type of feedback received in services like Yelp and RateMDs.com. These ratings also correlate with other types of hospital assessments. Therefore, the culture in the medical profession and the healthcare industry is shifting to treat a patient like a paying customer, as is the case in every other industry. Failure to do so will have an impact on revenues. As the shift continues toward how a free market works, hospital reviews become evermore important.

Informed decision-making

Consumers like the ability to choose and enjoy having power over decisions. This is as true for purchasing a car as it is on deciding on a healthcare provider. In patients with Medicare, this is illustrated by the fact that patients tend to choose better-performing providers and hospitals even though their pool of options is smaller. This means that the issue is not quantity, but quality. In general, although reviews are not perfect, the system of qualifying hospitals provides choice and a way to make an informed decision. These give prospective patients the same power of choice that they enjoy when shopping online. However, the rating systems for medical professionals do create more depth in qualification standards, as many systems for hospitals include metrics on patient experience, process, outcomes, safety, and cost, among others.

Some studies demonstrate that when providing certain parameters for choosing a doctor, non-clinical rating systems were as important to the person deciding as clinical ratings provided by government. This is significant because commercial websites that share information on medical facilities are as influential as results from federally funded surveys and studies that determine the quality of care of institutions. The fact that over 80 percent of individuals looking for a physician check online reviews before making the decision speaks to its importance.

If too many people are complaining over the quality of care, even if the patients don’t agree on what constitutes the metric, this type of information should raise a red flag for those looking for recommendations. Ultimately, this concludes two critical points. The first is that hospitals, doctors, and other medical professionals must understand and value the importance of patient relationships to gain the trust of the public. Second, patients need to value the new power and appreciate the importance of reading hospital reviews.