Becker's Hospital Review

96 CMO / CARE DELIVERY 'Told' is the word most linked to negative hospital reviews on Yelp By Megan Knowles W hen looking at hospital reviews on Yelp, research- ers found the word most associated with nega- tive reviews, including those with one-star rat- ings, was "told," a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found. The researchers, from Philadelphia-based Penn Medi- cine, analyzed 51,376 reviews for 1,566 U.S. hospitals and found the word "told" appeared in 20 percent of the posts (9,578 in total). Reviews that included the word "told" av- eraged 1.78 stars out of five stars. The one-star reviews the researchers saw that contained "told" highlighted frustrations about information that was ostensibly shared ("They never told me the cost of any of the procedures"), anger at a lack of listening ("I told her I did not want to discuss it any more but she persisted to badger me") and feelings of futility ("Some examined me and told me there was nothing they could do for me"). "Oftentimes, words such as 'told' hint at a breakdown in communication," Anish Agarwal, MD, a National Clinician Scholars fellow and emergency medicine physician at Penn Medicine, said in a news release. "I suspect that patients are not feeling listened to or heard and this could be driving poor experiences and low reviews." For the positive hospital reviews, the word "friendly" was found in about 11 percent of them (5,594 in all). Along with the word "friendly," "great" correlated the most with five-star reviews. In these reviews, patients often focused on hospital staff's demeanor and attentiveness ("The entire staff was very friendly and made sure we were taken care of"). "Patients value communication highly in their overall expe- rience when they're in the hospital," Dr. Agarwal said. "As healthcare transitions to being more patient-centered, I think hospitals and providers need to continue to work on how we improve communication, how we listen and how we approach all patient interactions." n How Stanford's WellMD center aims to fight physician burnout By Alyssa Rege T en years ago, Stanford (Calif.) Univer- sity began work to tackle the growing issue of physician burnout. In 2017, the institution created the WellMD Center, which aims to help medical professionals at Stanford and across the nation take steps to improve their own well-being so they can provide better care for patients. Bryan Bohman, MD, a senior adviser to Well- MD, spoke with Healio Psychiatric Annals and discussed Stanford's efforts to push the needle forward on physician well-being. He said the first step in fighting burnout was to acknowledge its significance and how it af- fects the system as a whole. "Evidence shows that the wellness of the healthcare providers has important effects on the health system performance — not just in quality, but also in patient satisfaction, fi- nancial outcomes, productivity and physician turnover. We wanted to create a structure that would emulate a quality department — a sus- tainably funded, organizationally endorsed center that would measure wellness, explore ways to improve it and basically elevate the consciousness of everybody in the organiza- tion that this is a major issue," he said. Dr. Bohman noted that Stanford created a wellness task force roughly five years ago and conversations among leadership led to the creation of the chief wellness officer position for the system. Tait Shanafelt, MD, was hired to the role in 2017. e system also created a physician wellness survey to gauge Stanford physicians' feelings about their work and overall well-being. e survey aims to study three areas that contrib- ute to physician wellness: personal resilience, culture of wellness and efficiency of practice. "Resilience is important and physicians should consider self-care as a professional obligation, similar to staying current with the latest medical literature. But with over 50 percent of physicians nationwide show- ing signs of burnout, health system leaders must not put the burden on the backs of phy- sicians to simply 'heal themselves.' We must take responsibility for improving healthcare systems, schools of medicine and the culture of medicine so that we don't create burnout among the highly capable and psychological- ly healthy individuals who enter the profes- sion," Dr. Bohman said. "I strongly believe that the combination of focusing on wellness as a high priority and developing performance improvement capa- bilities in the industry is going to be what pulls us out of this spiral we've been caught in [as] of late," he added. "If you look at the bottom line of what makes physicians hap- py, it's being able to take great care of their patients. at's why we went into medicine, that's the way we were trained, and so we will absolutely beat ourselves up trying to do that. If the system doesn't support us being able to do that in a way that's compatible with normal work-life balance and stress levels, we will keep trying anyway." n "Oftentimes, words such as 'told' hint at a breakdown in communication." — Dr. Anish Agarwal, Emergency Medicine, Penn Medicine

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