Leadership at Orlando Health knew that their providers offered excellent care experiences, but patient reviews on third-party websites did not reflect the high standards that the organization set for itself.

To take control of their online presence, and to offer customers the clearest possible picture of their care experience, leaders chose to host and publish star ratings on the organization’s website.

NRC Health’s Reputation capabilities use patient-experience data to gather and publish ratings and reviews. NRC Health’s tools capture patient comments and use AI-powered Natural Language Processing engine algorithmically to screen the comments for problematic content.

The process ensures that only authentic patient experiences—free of errors, libel, abuse, and HIPAA violations—ever appear on an organization’s website, giving visitors a highly credible overview of provider performance. In the age of Amazon, this visibility is critical for attracting new customers.

In addition to providing transparency for patients, the solution helps clinicians directly. By offering them an intuitive overview of their patients’ reviews, an invaluable resource for process improvement.

“We knew our customers already were talking about us online, and we wanted to ensure consumers were getting the whole story. So, we added ratings and comments from verified patient surveys to our website. Now, instead of a handful of reviews, we can display feedback from dozens to hundreds of former patients. That kind of robust data enables consumers to make better-informed decisions about the physicians they choose.”

—Andrew Snyder, SVP, Marketing and Communications, Orlando Health

Just one year into deploying NRC Health’s Reputation capabilities, Orlando Health leaders observed some transformative changes.

Spike in review volumes

Physicians must receive a minimum of 30 reviews before NRC Health’s solution publishes their ratings online. At Orlando Health, more than 400 physicians cleared this threshold.

Patients also reported overwhelming satisfaction after their care experiences. Average physician ratings reached 4.83 out of 5 stars.

Team buy-in

Orlando Health’s leaders observed an impact on the organization’s working culture. The visible, public record of performance spurred Orlando Health’s providers to vigorously pursue opportunities for improvement. They independently sought out coaching from the customer-experience team, and used what they learned to develop teaching moments for other physicians within the system.

400+

physicians with 30+ reviews

4.83 out of 5

average stars for physicians

Reliable data

Dr. Thomas Kelley, Orlando’s Chief of Quality and Clinical Transformation—and a practicing primary-care physician—relied on NRC Health’s capabilities to direct one of his patients to a surgical oncologist. Though Dr. Kelley didn’t know the oncologist personally, he was able to refer his patient quickly and with confidence, because the oncologist’s high star rating assured him of their quality.

Orlando Health started public transparency for most of our employed physicians in 2018. In the year and a half since providing this information to our community as well as other customer experience initiatives, we have seen a +1.2 point improvement in our CG-CAHPS Overall Physician Rating Top Box percent rating 9 or 10. This change in the Top Box percentage translates into a 10% increase in our ranking.

“As a primary care physician, it’s my responsibility to get patients to the best resources possible. By using physician ratings from actual patients, I don’t have to rely on the grapevine. I can put my patients in good hands right away.”

—Dr. Thomas Kelley, Vice President, Quality and Clinical Transformation, Orlando Health

NRC Health’s support to provide online transparency has made a stark impression on Orlando Health’s team. With more than 400 physicians now boasting excellent star reviews, the goal is for nearly all Orlando Health’s 600+ employed physicians to publish their ratings online. In encompassing the entire system, Orlando Health’s leaders are confident that physician ratings will help push providers to higher levels of performance.

Take-away tips

Orlando Health’s leaders have the following recommendations for health systems considering implementing a rating transparency initiative of their own:

1. Over-communicate
   Many physicians hesitate to embrace putting their personal star ratings online. Typically, they voice concern about ratings being influenced by factors they can’t control, such as facility amenities or wait times.To ease those concerns at Orlando Health, leaders embarked on an intensive awareness campaign. In multiple educational sessions with Orlando Health’s providers, they explained how physician ratings works, why it would benefit the organization, and how the solution protects the physicians from invalid reviews.

2. Reach across the organization
   Orlando Health’s leaders also recommend giving all stakeholders a sense of ownership over the physician rating transparency process.To do this, they established a steering committee composed of a broad cross-section of the organization’s leadership, including physicians, executives, marketing and communications staff, digital managers, and medical-staff office administrators.Bringing this diverse group together helped everyone feel included in the design of a major new initiative.

3. Start small
   Finally, to preserve smooth operations going forward, Orlando Health’s leaders took a conservative approach to their physician transparency rollout. They premiered it, at first, in only two of the organization’s departments: urology and oncology.This modest initial deployment was large enough to illustrate how physician transparency might work across the entire organization. But crucially, it was also small enough to allow for experimentation and tweaking, with minimal disruption.

“Our physicians are highly engaged. They’re hungry to improve all aspects of their care. Through patient comments, physician ratings gives them reliable, concrete points of improvement.”

—Sunil Desai, MD, Senior Vice President, Orlando Health and President, Orlando Heath Medical Group.