What factors affect patient reviews of urologists?

In this video, Jake Miller, MD, gives an overview of the study “It Can Only Get Worse: An Analysis of Factors Impacting Online Physician Reviews,” which he presented at the 2024 Sexual Medicine Society of North America Fall Scientific Meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona. Miller is a senior urology resident at the University of California, Irvine.

Transcription:

Please provide an overview of this study and its notable findings.

As we know, anywhere you go to find a physician, you can go online and search their names, and you'll typically get a Google review or Yelp review for them. Certainly, lots of patients who come into our clinics will mention that they find us through means of looking us up online, and one of their first interactions with us, even before speaking to us, can be through looking through those pages and reading others' reviews. And so that can certainly be a way that physicians can optimize their business and their outreach to other patients by trying to create a positive digital footprint for those patients. And so myself and one of our undergrad students over at the University of California, Irvine started a project to look at different factors that might impact those positive or negative findings. We were able to get a list of all of the SMSNA providers who would be at this conference as well, and then to plug in their names into 2 primary websites that patients can use to look up their physicians, and those are vitals.com and healthgrades.com. We went through everyone's websites, through hundreds to thousands of different reviews for these providers, and then created a subjective coding of all the common themes that were brought up. And then, following this, we actually looked at their out of 5-star review and then sat down and tried to analyze if certain frequencies of specific words or code phrases would impact those scores overall. What we found is that it's very difficult to raise your review on these websites, but fairly easy to drop your review. That's kind of the unfortunate thing that we're seeing, is that it's much, much easier to get a negative review after meeting one of these certain code words, as opposed to the opposite effect. Now, what's really interesting, and this might just be by virtue of the way that these websites work, is that some of the stereotypical things that we think about and that physicians can worry about, such as wait times for those visits, that didn't actually have too great of an impact on what we were seeing. But typically, the big 2 things that, after this data, we would suggest to physicians to look out for, number 1, availability by phone or email tended to be something that patients had issues with for their providers, and then also the knowledge base and responsiveness of clinic staff, so medical assistants, nurse practitioners, [and] PAs. Many times, [patients] mentioned that they would call while waiting to hear back from a physician, and that they had unpleasant interactions or they weren't able to get certain information or advice from these other ancillary staff. And so that could potentially be something that we as care physicians can do for these patients is to sit down with the rest of their staff and say, "If someone calls post operatively with XYZ concerns, this is a script that we can go over while they're waiting to hear back from us," just to give them a sense of advice prior to proceeding.

This transcript was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.