Significant Drop in Online Healthcare Reviews After Covid: Study Finds
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After the COVID-19 pandemic struck, online reviews of health care facilities dropped signficiantly, and they have not yet fully recovered, according to a new analysis led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. More than half of reviews on the online platform, Yelp, now are negative, flipping the pre-COVID picture. The findings are published today in JAMA Network Open.
By analyzing all reviews of health care facilities in the United States on the online platform Yelp dated from 2014 through 2023, Researchers 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.
In fact, from the latter half of 2021 on, the researchers found that positive reviews were never more than 50%. In analyzing the reviews, the researchers used a language processing technique to tease out the most common topics from the reviews, organized them into themes, and measured how they changed over time.
The themes that saw the greatest change in mentions between the pre- and post-COVID periods were “insurance and billing issues” and “customer service and staff behavior.” One theme mentioned less in negative reviews after the arrival of COVID—and a renewed, supercharged focus on hygiene: Facility cleanliness.
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.
Reference: Sehgal NKR, Agarwal AK, Southwick L, et al. Disparities by Race and Urbanicity in Online Health Care Facility Reviews. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(11):e2446890. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.46890
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