Here are the top health systems by patient reviews

In its latest 2022 healthcare industry report, Reputation, which helps companies manage their brands, ranked the leading 15 health systems in the U.S. 

The report, in its second year, looked at the top 25 largest health systems in the U.S. by 2021 revenue and ranked them, using a proprietary scoring method, by publicly available patient feedback. The top 15 leaders are:

1. Community Health Systems
2. HCA Healthcare
3. Universal Health Services
4. Baylor Scott & White Health
5. CommonSpirit Health
6. Trinity Health
7. AdventHealth
8. Ascension
9. Tenet Healthcare
10. Sutter Health
11. Northwell Health
12. University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
13. Spectrum Health
14. Banner Health

15. Intermountain Healthcare


To get the scores, Reputation used natural language processing and artificial intelligence to analyze more than 2.7 million patient reviews across more than 179,000 locations using providers’ sites, Google and social media. The analysis looked at children’s hospitals, critical access hospitals and long-term and short-term acute care. The score measures sentiment, visibility and engagement across nine different elements like review volume and listing accuracy. 

What set leaders apart most was engagement with feedback and having more feedback in general. Bedside manner was found to be the biggest driver of positive sentiment, while ratings of administrative staff were the biggest driver of negative sentiment. 

“When you think about brand reputation, it's really about what your customers say about you. It’s not just what you say about you,” Annie Haarmann, head of strategy and consulting for healthcare and life sciences at Reputation, told Fierce Healthcare.

Those that made themselves easier to find on Google were also more likely to be found, considered and chosen. Google Business Profile actions, like someone clicking on a profile, increased 12% for hospitals in 2021 compared to the year prior. 

“The uptick shows just how actively consumers are using Profiles as a jumping-off point for finding a hospital,” the report noted. “It’s Google’s world—and healthcare is living in it.”

For physicians, meanwhile, actions were down 1%, driven by a drop in clicks to physician sites, though views of profiles were up 14%. Positive reviews typically mentioned physicians by name and praised their compassion and skills. Negative reviews focused on administrative problems like billing or rude receptionists.

Reviews of healthcare facilities increased 50% for hospitals and nearly 60% for physicians compared to 2020. Facilities also achieved slightly higher average ratings compared to the year before, while physicians saw a slight drop.

Vaccine rollout impacted review volume, which surged during the first four months of 2021 and then tapered off drastically. Positive feedback related to the vaccination process usually mentioned how smooth the process was. The vaccine experience is not expected to continue being a driver of positive sentiment in 2022, Reputation noted in its report.

Taking into account the way the pandemic has affected the medical community, Reputation also wanted to track employee sentiment. “Burnout has reached critical mass at this point. It's such a crisis,” Haarmann said. So, in addition to customer feedback, the company analyzed 1 million online reviews by employees from sites like Glassdoor and Indeed. It found that employee feedback was consistently lower than customer feedback and lower than other industries. Feedback from nurses continues to be more negative than other providers and staff. What matters most to nurses, Reputation found, is the people around them, compensation and management.

Reputation urged providers to systematically collect more feedback and to respond to it as well as to keep their Google business profiles up to date. Organizations that began programmatically collecting reviews in 2021 had higher scores and moved up on the list compared to the year prior, Haarmann said. While some providers worry that asking for reviews at scale will lead to an uptick in negative sentiment, the opposite is actually true: Doing so activates the silent majority that had a positive experience but did not think to leave a review. And more reviews increase visibility on Google.

“You’re basically creating a more accurate scientific representation of the data because you’ve got a control—you’re asking everybody instead of just leaving it up to chance,” Haarmann said.