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 led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. More than half of reviews on the online platform, Yelp, now are negative, flipping the pre-COVID picture. The findings are published today 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. These reviews can help hospitals understand what matters most to patients and their support networks in near real time." Neil Sehgal, ME, study's lead author, associate fellow in the Penn Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics 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, MD, an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine, and their team saw that the percentage of positive-;four- and five-star-;reviews dropped from 54.
3 percent before March 2020 (marked as the beginning of the COVID pandemic in the United States) to 47.9 percent after. In fact, from the latter half of 2021 on, the researchers found that positive reviews were never more than 50 percent.
"We analyzed Yelp reviews of health facilities nationwide-;which includes hospitals, urgent care centers, doctors' offices, and mo.
