Thank you for your willingness to help others!
By sharing our experiences, insights, or stories, we improve other’s chances of making well informed choices. Please help us help others by providing the information below.
If you’re a patient but unsure about what to share, check out How do I share my satisfaction scores.
Note that only the areas with a red asterisk (*) are required.
Learn from others, and consider sharing your story more broadly
There are several other groups who are already sharing experiences that we wanted to make sure you know about. Consider sharing your story at one or more of these sites as well:
Yelp. That’s right, the same app you used to find a good Greek restaurant when you were visiting a new town. It’s not a typo. You can either enter ‘Doctors’ in the main search window, or navigate to ‘More Categories’, then ‘All Categories’, then ‘Health & Medical’, then ‘Doctors’ followed by their specialty (or another category if something other than a doctor).
If you have a condition, symptoms, or are receiving a treatment, take a look at Patients Like Me. They provide connections with others like you for education and social support.
Smart Patients is an online community where patients and caregivers can learn from others like them. This includes information on research, clinical trials, and personal stories.
In the unfortunate circumstance where you feel you've been harmed, go to The Voices of Patient Harm. Sponsored by ProPublica, who gathered over 1,000 stories from patients and loved ones in all 50 states in an effort to confront the problem of lack of acknowledgement, accountability, or follow-up by providers. Volunteer journalists can be matched up with sources to research and report in depth. Also includes advice the harmed patients offer to others to avoid harm.
If you're interested in consumer feedback specific to medications, Iodine is a 'Community of over 100,000 people sharing their medication experience and advice.'
CAHPS surveys ask patients to report on their experiences with a range of health care services delivered in ambulatory, hospital, dialysis, nursing home and other settings.
“In what is believed to be the first large-scale analysis of such data, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania looked at 17,000 Yelp reviews of 1,352 hospitals from consumers. They found that the online information provides a broader sense of a facility than the current gold standard — a U.S. government survey that costs millions of dollars to develop and implement each year."
"The Yelp reviews had information about 12 additional categories that weren't addressed in the government survey. Those include the cost of the hospital visit, insurance and billing, ancillary testing, facilities, amenities, scheduling, compassion of staff, family member care, quality of nursing, quality of staff, quality of technical aspects of care, and specific type of medical care.
For positive reviews they included caring doctors, nurses and staff; comforting; surgery/procedure and peri-op; and labor and delivery. And for negative reviews, they included insurance and billing and cost of hospital visit.
'They relate to the interpersonal relationships of patients with physicians, nurses and staff,' said Benjamin L. Ranard, a junior fellow at the Penn Social Media and Health Innovation Lab and the study's lead author. This is important, he said, because 'prospective patients are likely to want to know how caring and comforting caregivers are in various departments of a hospital.' "
What Yelp can tell you about a hospital that official ratings can't, from The Washington Post
Source Study - Yelp Reviews of Hospital Care Can Supplement And Inform Traditional Surveys Of The Patient Experience Of Care, from Health Affairs
Hospital Safety Score grades hospitals on how safe they keep their patients from errors, injuries, accidents and infections. From their newsroom: 'Selecting the Right Hospital Can Reduce Your Risk of Avoidable Death by 50%', according to Analysis of Newly Updated Hospital Safety Score Grades.
ConsumersUnion, a policy and action branch of Consumer Reports, sponsors the Safe Patient Project where patients can share their stories. Topics include Medical Errors, Hospital Infections, Hip and Knee Replacements, and Doctor Accountability.