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Introduction
The last few years have seen a fundamental transformation of the modern US hospitals. In the quest to become more patient-centric, one area of renewed focus is patient satisfaction. While always a point of emphasis, hospitals have recently begun to take note of the attention given to initiatives around customer satisfaction and retention in other service industries. Companies with high customer satisfaction scores enjoy a wide range of tangible economic benefits including increased sales, greater profitability and lower customer turnover (Heskett, 1987; Heskett et al., 1994, 1997).
Advancements in Web 2.0 technologies and the development of websites built around online customer reviews have made soliciting the opinions of customers easier than ever before. Many organizations, in particular manufacturing and retail service organizations, have been quick to embrace online customer reviews as a new way of truly understanding their customer grievances, thereby leading to their needs and wants. These organizations realize that in the age of social media, customers have a much louder voice and the ability to influence large segments of an organization's customer base (Brodalski, 2011; Holt, 2016; Killian and McManus, 2015). Many service organizations go to great lengths and provide significant incentives to solicit customer comments from organizations. However, despite these advantages and an espoused interest in improving patient satisfaction scores, many US hospitals lag behind other service organizations in their use of new and emerging data resources and technology (Acohido, 2013; Hernandez et al., 2015; Landi, 2018; Sullivan, 2018). As a result, investment in online customer reviews has been largely overlooked by US hospitals.
The primary reason for this is that US hospitals have for quite some time now relied on industry-specific customer feedback mechanisms—the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey and other tools (Cahill and Wang, 2012). These standardized surveys are designed to capture key aspects of the patient experience relevant for regulatory requirements and key aspects of health outcomes. While HCAHPS surveys serve a valuable function within the hospital organizations, they have several key disadvantages when compared with online customer reviews. First, the HCAHPS is expensive to administer, in terms of both cost and requisite resources. With online customer reviews, customers provide all of the information and are completely in charge of what...