Abstract
Purpose :
Patient satisfaction with the care experience is a critical element of overall high quality healthcare delivery, and patients increasingly utilize online crowd-sourced physician rating tools to evaluate and select a physician. We performed a retrospective characterization of one-star reviews on yelp.com. We hypothesized that most reviews would be nonclinical in nature and that complaints referencing a procedural episode would be largely clinical in nature.
Methods :
A search was performed for reviews on yelp.com using the keyword “ophthalmologist” for the top 8 most population-dense metropolitan areas in the United States. One-star reviews were classified as procedural or nonprocedural. Complaints were analyzed and categorized as clinical or nonclinical.
Results :
5,532 reviews were assessed, of which 477 (8.6%) were one-star reviews to be analyzed. These reviews amounted to 1,120 distinct complaints, 287 (25.6%) were clinical in nature and 833 (74.4%) were nonclinical. The most common clinical complaints were technical incompetence/error (50; 17.4%), unsatisfactory result (46; 16.0%), and complication (43; 15.0%). The most common nonclinical complaints were office staff interpersonal (182; 21.8%), wait time (174; 20.9%), and physician interpersonal (141; 16.9%). Patients reporting an ophthalmologic procedure (surgery, injection, etc.) wrote 64 reviews resulting in 193 (17.2%) complaints. Nonprocedural patients wrote 413 reviews resulting in 927 (82.8%) complaints. Compared with nonprocedural reviews, procedural reviews were more likely to relate a clinical complaint (93.8% procedural vs. 28.6% nonprocedural, P < 0.001).
Conclusions :
The majority of one-star reviews of ophthalmologists in highly populated urban areas included in this study focused on nonclinical complaints unrelated to a procedure performed by the clinician being reviewed, confirming our hypothesis. Procedural complaints were more likely to include a clinical component to the review. These findings can help clinicians identify and address unique healthcare delivery challenges in the field of ophthalmology.
This abstract was presented at the 2022 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Denver, CO, May 1-4, 2022, and virtually.