U.S. News & World Report recently announced a new collaboration with Binary Fountain, a provider of patient feedback management solutions with one of the largest data repositories of online patient reviews and surveys in the healthcare industry. Through this relationship, U.S. News now publishes patient experience ratings from Binary Fountain on many of its doctor profile pages, enabling consumers to compare physicians and help make more informed healthcare decisions.
“In the age of healthcare consumerism, patient experience information has become a crucial piece of information for patients and families when choosing a physician,” said Chad Smolinski, chief product officer of U.S. News.
A recent national survey found that 75 percent of Americans say online ratings and review sites have influenced their decision when selecting a physician. Consumers researching care options on U.S. News’ Doctor Finder site will now have the ability to access an overall patient satisfaction rating, alongside as many as 10 individual patient experience metrics related to common topics that prospective patients care about when choosing a new provider. These ratings reflect patients’ feedback on factors such as good communication, clarity of instructions, provider’s attitude and follow-up.
Binary Fountain aggregates patient feedback from more than 100 online sources and then uses a proprietary Natural Language Processing engine to extract insights and derive a rating for each of the 10 patient experience metrics. These ratings are not indicators of medical quality; rather they are a reflection – with a score of fair to excellent – of consumers’ overall patient satisfaction.
Patient experience data will be added to U.S. News doctor profiles across multiple specialties over the next several months, beginning with family medicine physicians.
