If you ask any patient, the "patient experience" truly begins before he or she even steps foot inside a hospital. Rather, the experience starts with the patient's search — increasingly online — for the appropriate physician to treat his or her condition.
Just as savvy consumers use the Internet to compare prices for airline tickets or book reservations at restaurants, patients look to the web to shop for physicians. Specifically, these searches occur on hospitals' physician finder pages.
Consumers expect these searches to guide them to the appropriate provider as well as fulfill other preferences, such as location and accepted insurance plans. Unfortunately, many hospitals' physician finder sites contain incomplete or inconsistent information and lack basic search capabilities, leaving many patients lost, according to Kyruus' 2014 Physician Finder Capability Report Report.
"Patients come to physician finders expecting accurate information about physician specialties, locations and insurance plans. Instead, they often leave feeling confused by the lack of information and frustrated by the inability to book an appointment or perform other online functions that are routine in the airline and many other industries," said Graham Gardner, MD, Kyruus' CEO and co-founder. "Fortunately, increasing attention on the patient experience is prompting many healthcare systems to rethink how they can best serve patients accessing their digital channel."
Kyruus identified 40 of the top hospitals and health systems across the country and analyzed their physician finder sites in two phases: the first to quantify the presence of various types of search capabilities, and the second to assess the accuracy of the sites' type-in search capabilities and the resulting match.
The results of the study revealed that the majority of the physician finder sites for the 40 hospitals and health systems provide only partially correct information, if they have the search capability at all. According to the report, these sites can best serve as a general information source when a patient knows the specific name and specialty of a provider, but they can also provide misleading information that could potentially send patients in the wrong direction.
The majority of the physician finder sites evaluated had basic search and filter capabilities such as the ability to search by specialty and name (98 percent) and location (88 percent), but much fewer had capabilities to search by type of condition (48 percent), online appointment request (33 percent), type of insurance accepted (30 percent), whether the provider was accepting new patients (15 percent), search by symptom (15 percent) and availability (10 percent). None of the hospitals has the capability to book appointments online.
When scoring each site by total functionality, only 12 percent of the 40 sites provide greater functionality than 60 percent of the capabilities assessed, and 28 percent provide between 50 and 60 percent of the capabilities. The remaining 60 percent provide less than 50 percent of the capabilities.
In the second phase of analysis, researches typed in six search terms to evaluate the accuracy of results, including headache, atrial fibrillation, back pain, hernia, claudication and rash. Of these terms, "headache" returned the most accurate results, but only half of the websites resulted in appropriate providers. Ninety percent of hospital and health system websites could not provide the correct search result for "rash."
The unreliability of many websites' search capabilities is highlighted by the finding that many sites matched the string of text for the search "rash" to a physician's name, such as "Rashid" or "Arash," according to the report.
The findings of this report highlight the inefficiencies patients experience when searching for an appropriate physician. Inaccurate searches can lead to millions of patients seeking care from providers who are either inappropriate to treat them or unable to accept them into their practice. But patients aren't the only ones who stand to gain from more accurate physician finder sites. By optimizing such websites, health systems have the opportunity to enhance patient engagement, and for providers, referring patients to the appropriate physician the first time, according to the report.
"Health systems can benefit greatly by applying the lessons learned in the travel industry. No one would use a travel site to book flights if it showed just the contact information for the wrong airplane. The information has to be accurate, useful, searchable and actionable," Dr. Gardner said.