Online Ratings of Facial Plastic Surgeons: Worthwhile Additions to Conventional Patient Experience Surveys.

Background

Physician review websites are now commonly used by patients. However, in facial plastic surgery, the trends and content in these websites are not well studied. We examined online reviews for U.S. facial plastic surgeons, and compared comment content with the most commonly used patient experience survey, the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) administered by Press Ganey.

Methods

A retrospective mixed method study was employed to quantitatively compare online ratings and comments of 100 randomly selected U.S. facial plastic surgeons on vitals.com, healthgrades.com, google.com and zocdoc.com. Qualitative content analysis was utilized to categorize themes present in 957 patient-generated (unverified) comments, and compare these with CAHPS survey questions and themes.

Results

The physician review websites had favorable ratings of facial plastic surgeons with 84.55% five-star reviews on Healthgrades and 78.40% on Vitals. These ratings were similar across surgeon age (p = 0.44), gender (p = 0.85), and geographic region (p = 0.29). Of sites examined, Healthgrades and Vitals were most frequently used. Analysis of patient comments identified themes aligning with CAHPS content (e.g., physician interactions, efficiency, and recommendation likelihood), as well as additional themes such as patient's outcome perception (55.28% of comments) and finances (86% of negatively rated reviews).

Conclusions

These exploratory results suggest that facial plastic surgeons are generally rated positively online, and the comments left on these websites provide additional feedback that is not currently included in CAHPS surveys. In evaluating the patient experience with facial plastic surgery practices, these websites may prove to be useful.