What Are Star Ratings?
Patient Experience Star Rating FAQs
Akron Children’s values the relationships we have with our patients and their loved ones. As part of our commitment to you, we want to help you make informed decisions about your family’s health care and about the providers who care for you. As part of that commitment, we post our provider's patient experience ratings online.
These star ratings and comments come from patient surveys administered by NRC Health, an independent company that specializes in health care research.
To assist you, we’ve developed this guide to help understand how we capture and report our patient experience ratings.
About The National Research Corporation (NRC) Survey
Akron Children’s is focused on providing an exceptional experience in every care interaction. We measure all aspects of patient experience. In order to ensure that we are holding ourselves to the highest standards, we partnered with National Research Corporation (NRC), an independent, third-party patient experience company. NRC provides the technology to display ratings and comments on our physician profile pages. All ratings are submitted by actual patients and verified by NRC.
Who Receives the Survey?
The survey is sent by either text message, email or phone call to the family of Akron Children’s patients within a few days following their visit. Patient families are asked to complete the survey and provide comments regarding specific aspects of care. We use this feedback to improve and enhance the care we offer.
Do You Post All Comments?
Akron Children’s is committed to transparency. That means posting all relevant feedback – whether it’s positive or negative. However, we do not post comments that are libelous, profane, or those that risk the privacy of our patients.
Phone surveys record comment responses for up to 1 minute. At times, you may see the text [inaudible] indicating that the comment response was undeterminable from the recording. For comments that end abruptly, you will see the text [end of recording] indicating that the maximum recording time was exceeded.
Every provider rating is published regardless of comment status.
What Questions Do We Ask?
Akron Children’s utilizes NRC’s Medical Practice survey which is used in medical practices across the country. The surveys ask patient families to evaluate how well their physician communicated, listened, and showed courtesy and respect toward them. Results are used to evaluate patient families’ overall perception of care and to identify areas for improvement.
We calculate our star ratings based on responses to the below question from the NRC survey.
- How likely would you be to recommend this provider to your family and friends
Why Don’t We See Patient Ratings and Comments for Every Doctor or Provider?
Industry best practice is clear that more data provides a more accurate picture. That’s why we require a minimum of 30 completed patient surveys per doctor before we post a physician’s rating. Over time, with more surveys received on an ongoing basis, the number of rated providers will increase.
Why Don’t We See Patient Ratings For Every Specialty?
Some of Akron Children’s services are not included in the National Research Corporation survey; however, if you wish to share feedback about your visit, we’d love to hear from you. Visit our How are we Doing? page to share your feedback: https://www.akronchildrens.org/cgi-bin/mailto_how_doing/contact.pl
A provider’s rating will only be posted on the site when he/she has a minimum of 30 completed surveys.
Can anyone complete a survey or post a comment about a provider?
No. Although patients who have encounters in other hospital settings will receive a survey (for example the ER, inpatient units, surgery, or lab work), only patients having an outpatient visit with an Akron Children’s provider may have comments posted about the provider on our website. In addition, the comments posted on our website are entirely from patients who have actually been treated by the provider.
How is patient information protected?
Patient names are not displayed through the online ratings and commentary reviews. All personally identifiable information is removed prior to display.
