Topic: How IU Health Manages Online Ratings And Reviews To Better Serve Patients

Becoming more customer-friendly for patients was the primary reason IU Health launched its online ratings and reviews initiative, executive director of digital marketing and experience says.

Indianapolis-based IU Health has launched and implemented an extensive effort to post physician and clinic-level star ratings and reviews online.

After University of Utah Health pioneered online physician reviews in 2012, a small but growing number of health systems have followed in its footsteps. For health systems that have implemented posting online ratings and reviews, the initiatives are viewed as an essential element of transparency and patient experience.

Becoming more customer-friendly for patients was the primary reason IU Health launched its online ratings and reviews initiative in 2018, says Jeremy Rogers, the health system’s executive director of digital marketing and experience.

“We heard from our patients through studies and surveys that they wanted to have this type of information when they were making critical decisions about who their next physician or provider would be. We all know in our modern lives that we use ratings and reviews for almost every decision we make—whether it’s our next vacation or purchasing a new car. One of the first things we do is go online and look for reviews from other customers,” he says.

The IU Health initiative has achieved significant results since its launch a year-and- a-half ago:

• The health system is publishing ratings and reviews for more than 1,500 clinicians
• About 150,000 reviews have been posted online
• The volume of reviews is growing by about 7,500 reviews per month
• The average provider star rating is between 4.6 and 4.7 out of 5 stars
• More than 500 IU Health locations are getting star ratings. “These locations are at the clinic level, so a hospital could have dozens of locations with star ratings,” Rogers says.

Star ratings and online reviews are drawn from a patient experience survey developed at IU Health three years ago.

For every patient inpatient and outpatient encounter, within 48 hours patients receive an email or a text message asking them to respond to the survey. The survey has a half-dozen questions such as likelihood to recommend a clinician to friends and family, whether the clinician spent enough time with the patient, and whether the clinician made the experience easy for the patient.

“We get a strong response rate to our surveys—about 20% to 25% of patients respond. On an annualized basis, we are processing about half a million survey responses,” Rogers says.

In addition to generating star ratings for physicians and advanced practice practitioners, the data is used internally for score cards that go out to administrators and individual clinicians to show the experience they are providing to patients.

Topic Discussed: How IU Health Manages Online Ratings And Reviews To Better Serve Patients

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