An Analysis of Consumer Reviews for More than 3,800 Hospitals — and How Online Reputation Drives Revenue

Today’s healthcare consumers find healthcare providers online, and they rely on information in online reviews and social media to inform their decisions. This means that for health systems and providers, maintaining a stellar online reputation is essential. Systems and providers that neglect their online reputation will struggle to compete with others that proactively manage their reputation, because they will consistently show up higher in search rankings with more positive reviews.

To create the Healthcare Reputation Report, Reputation.com’s data science team applied artificial intelligence, machine learning and sentiment analysis to unstructured text in reviews of 4,800 hospitals that report revenue annually to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). From that sample, they included 3,824 hospitals with 10 or more online reviews on Google or Facebook between January 1, 2016 and August 31, 2018.

Key findings include:

  • A strong Reputation Score predicts higher revenue per bed. Specifically, hospitals with a Reputation Score in the top 25% have a revenue per bed that is $1.2 million higher than hospitals with a Reputation Score in the bottom 25%.
  • Google is dominating the search landscape in healthcare and is the top vehicle used for the healthcare listings that consumers use to find organizations and providers.
  • The top 5 sites (Google, HomePages, Apple, Facebook and Bing) constitute 89% of all sites used to find healthcare listings.
  • Tier 2 sites (Healthgrades, WebMD, Yahoo and Vitals) now make up only 10% of the sites visited when patients look for healthcare listings.
  • Hospital reviews on Google grew an incredible 86% from 2016 to 2018 (Figure 2), establishing it as the preferred platform for leaving hospital reviews.

In addition to these findings, the report uncovers the Reputation Score for the top 100 health systems in our study. It also explores the three best practices that health systems and providers must focus on to improve their online reputation.