Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 23, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 28, 2018 - Sep 22, 2018
Date Accepted: Jan 23, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
“But His Yelp Reviews Are Awful!” Analysis of General Surgeons’ Yelp Reviews
ABSTRACT
Background:
Patients use online platforms to review physicians. However, little is known about the content of such reviews or how they relate to physicians’ characteristics or their practices.
Objective:
In this observational study, we sought to analyze the online reputation of general surgeons on the west side of Los Angeles.
Methods:
Demographics, practice characteristics, and online presence were recorded. We evaluated frequency and types of Yelp reviews and assigned negative remarks to five categories. Tabulated results were evaluated using independent t-test, one-way ANOVA, and Pearson’s correlation analysis to determine associations between number of total and negative reviews with respect to practice structure and physician characteristics.
Results:
Of the 146 general surgeons, 51 (34.9%) had at least 1 review, and 29 (19.9%) had at least 1 negative review. There were 806 total reviews, 679 (84.2%) positive reviews, and 127 (15.8%) negative reviews. The negative reviews contained a total of 376 negative remarks, categorized into: physician demeanor (124, 32.9%), clinical outcomes (81, 21.5%), office/staff (83, 22.0%), scheduling (44, 11.7%), and billing (44, 11.7%). Surgeons with a professional website had significantly more reviews than those without (P=0.003). Surgeons in private practice had significantly more reviews (P =0.002) and more negative reviews (P =0.03) than surgeons who were institution employed. A strong and direct correlation was found between a surgeon’s number of reviews and number of negative reviews (P<0.001).
Conclusions:
As the most common category of complaints were about physician demeanor, surgeons may optimize their online reputation by improving their bedside manner. A surgeon’s web presence, private practice, and total number of reviews are significantly associated with both positive and negative reviews.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.