Guest Contributor
After the COVID-19 pandemic struck, online reviews of health care facilities dropped significantly, and they have not yet fully recovered, according to a new analysis by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine and School of Engineering and Applied Science. More than half of reviews on the online platform, Yelp, now are negative, flipping the pre-COVID picture. The findings are published in JAMA Network Open.
“Online reviews can tell us information about the patient experience that traditional reporting metrics, like hospital-administered patient experience surveys, might miss,” says the study’s lead author, Neil Sehgal, an associate fellow in the Penn Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and Penn Engineering Ph.D. student. “These reviews can help hospitals understand what matters most to patients and their support networks in near real time.”
By analyzing all reviews of health care facilities in the United States on the online platform Yelp dated from 2014 through 2023, Sehgal, co-author Anish Agarwal, an assistant professor of emergency medicine, and their team saw that the percentage of positive—four- and five-star—reviews dropped from 54.3% before March 2020 (marked as the beginning of the COVID pandemic in the United States) to 47.9% after.
This story was written by Frank Otto. To read the full article, please visit Penn Medicine News.