Giving Compass' Take:

• Steven Martino and his partners researched whether or not patient reviews can help health care providers better understand the patient experience. 

• Martino's research revealed that short, detailed reviews helped health care providers understand how to improve soft skills like communication style and coordination of care. How can donors best utilize this information to better the healthcare system?

• Read about how hospital leaders value innovations focused on patients and staff. 

Steven Martino studies health care quality at RAND, and he knows the power of a good story. Those two facts help explain a project he's been working on that could make the American health care system a little more responsive to the patients it serves. Martino and his research partners have developed a more effective and reliable way for patients to provide narrative feedback about the care they receive. They were inspired by consumer websites like Amazon, where people post comments by the thousands on everything from books to blenders.

Done right, they realized, short but detailed reviews could help health care providers better understand the patient experience, the good and the bad, in the patient's own words.

The power of narratives is that they convey emotion, they engage people at an emotional level,” Martino said. “They're vivid, they convey detailed information, and they stick with people.”

Martino's team developed a set of questions to guide patients through providing a short but detailed review of their care. They asked what patients expected from their doctor, what happened during their appointment, what they liked and disliked about the experience, and how they related to their doctor. It took around five minutes to complete.

And it worked. The researchers gave the questions to hundreds of patients, then went back and interviewed many of them to see how well their answers to the questions captured their full experience as conveyed in the interview.

They found that those five-minute reviews covered a surprising amount of ground. They were especially good at conveying how patients felt about their doctor's communication style, their interactions with the front desk, and the coordination of their care.

Read the full article about patient reviews by  Doug Irving at RAND.