Toward quality transparency in healthcare: Exploring hospital-operated online physician review systems in northeastern United States

Objective: Hospitals are increasingly offering physician review systems to help prospective patients make informed physician selection decisions. Accordingly, this study sought to determine what types and percentage of hospitals in the northeastern United States presented online physician reviews and which measures were used most and least frequently in the hospitals' patient satisfaction surveys. Materials and methods: We visited the websites of 1007 hospitals and collected information about whether/how they provided online physician reviews. We then performed descriptive and comparative analysis. Results: Nearly 7% of the hospitals published patient reviews of physicians on their websites. The hospitals that (1) were non-profit, (2) were located in Pennsylvania, or (3) provided general care services were most likely to provide online physician reviews. Those hospitals mostly adapted either a government-provided survey instrument or its extended version offered by Press Ganey Associates. However, the types and number of measures used varied across hospitals. Discussion: Hospitals located in Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont do not yet offer online physician review systems. Moreover, non-acute, specialty care hospitals and government-owned medical centers rarely provide such systems, suggesting that driving factors such as incentive programs should be offered at the government and state levels to motivate them to implement patient-centered quality assessment and transparency mechanisms. Furthermore, efforts should be made to standardize those systems to make physician reviews useful and comparable across healthcare providers. Conclusion: Future research should examine how to improve the quality and usability of these systems to better empower patients in their decision-making. (C) 2019 Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.