How Nebraska Medicine embraced transparency and improved its ratings
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Embracing transparency: How Nebraska Medicine persuaded 1,000+ physicians to publicize their ratings and reviews

Nebraska Medicine has served the Omaha metropolitan area for over 150 years. Today, with 1,000+ physicians operating out of more than 40 health centers and two hospitals, the network continues to deliver on its promise: Serious medicine, extraordinary care.

While this promise may be evident to the hundreds of thousands of patients who pass through Nebraska Medicine’s doors annually, the question became, how do you share these results with the outside world? How do you empower patients to make the most informed decisions about healthcare? The answer: full transparency around ratings and reviews.

Why is transparency important? It starts with patient trust.

The modern-day patient is proactive in their journey to care — with more options and agency in their decision-making than ever before. As a result, objective ratings and reviews play an important role when they’re selecting a physician. This is evidenced in the rise of third-party directories and review sites — e.g., Healthgrades, Vitals, WebMD, and Google, among others — as well as the inclusion of star ratings and patient feedback on a hospital’s own physician directory.

A patient came in and said, ‘I picked you because of your star ratings.’ They know we’ll post any review that’s pertinent to that provider — the good, the bad, and the ugly. It provides the validation that positive comments are real.

Nebraska Medicine observed the cultural shift toward increased transparency across the medical space and, in 2016, turned to Doctor.com, a Press Ganey solution, to add patient survey data to physician profiles. But instead of cherry-picking favorable ratings and flattering reviews, the team committed to full transparency: publishing feedback across the spectrum. Patients weighing their options “know we’ll post any review that’s pertinent to that provider — the good, the bad, and the ugly,” says Jason Bash, Nebraska Medicine’s manager of digital communications. “It provides the validation that positive comments are real.”

Even after the transparency solution gained overwhelming support from executive leadership, the team behind the initiative faced a new challenge: How do you get 1,000+ physicians on board? Right out of the gate, most were hesitant to publish patient feedback that they didn’t have control over.

Nebraska Medicine not only got physician buy-in, but they also improved their overall scores in the process. Read on to see how they did it — as well as the outstanding results the team achieved within a matter of months. Download the case study here.

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