Online health care reviews turned negative following COVID pandemic

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.

"We analyzed Yelp reviews of health facilities nationwide-which includes hospitals, urgent care centers, doctors' offices, and more," says Sehgal. "Our analysis shows how public perception of health care changed after COVID-19. And with this information, hopefully, health care professionals can work to improve upon what's been driving these opinions."

While positive reviews of health care facilities on Yelp, as a whole, declined over time, health care facilities in rural areas already had lower ratings at the start of the time period examined, and the differences became more significant after COVID struck. Post-COVID, rural facilities were 23% less likely to have positive reviews, compared to health facilities in urban areas, which were 7% less likely to have positive reviews.

Read more at Penn Medicine News.