Sources of Traffic and Visitors’ Preferences Regarding Online Public Reports of Quality: Web Analytics and Online Survey Results

Abstract

BackgroundIn the context of the Affordable Care Act, there is extensive emphasis on making provider quality transparent and publicly available. Online public reports of quality exist, but little is known about how visitors find reports or about their purpose in visiting.ObjectiveTo address this gap, we gathered website analytics data from a national group of online public reports of hospital or physician quality and surveyed real-time visitors to those websites.MethodsWebsites were recruited from a national group of online public reports of hospital or physician quality. Analytics data were gathered from each website: number of unique visitors, method of arrival for each unique visitor, and search terms resulting in visits. Depending on the website, a survey invitation was launched for unique visitors on landing pages or on pages with quality information. Survey topics included type of respondent (eg, consumer, health care professional), purpose of visit, areas of interest, website experience, and demographics.ResultsThere were 116,657 unique visitors to the 18 participating websites (1440 unique visitors/month per website), with most unique visitors arriving through search (63.95%, 74,606/116,657). Websites with a higher percent of traffic from search engines garnered more unique visitors (P=.001). The most common search terms were for individual hospitals (23.25%, 27,122/74,606) and website names (19.43%, 22,672/74,606); medical condition terms were uncommon (0.81%, 605/74,606). Survey view rate was 42.48% (49,560/116,657 invited) resulting in 1755 respondents (participation rate=3.6%). There were substantial proportions of consumer (48.43%, 850/1755) and health care professional respondents (31.39%, 551/1755). Across websites, proportions of consumer (21%-71%) and health care professional respondents (16%-48%) varied. Consumers were frequently interested in using the information to choose providers or assess the quality of their provider (52.7%, 225/427); the majority of those choosing a provider reported that they had used the information to do so (78%, 40/51). Health care professional (26.6%, 115/443) and consumer (20.8%, 92/442) respondents wanted cost information and consumers wanted patient narrative comments (31.5%, 139/442) on the public reports. Health care professional respondents rated the experience on the reports higher than consumers did (mean 7.2, SD 2.2 vs mean 6.2, SD 2.7; scale 0-10; P<.001).ConclusionsReport sponsors interested in increasing the influence of their reports could consider using techniques to improve search engine traffic, providing cost information and patient comments, and improving the website experience for both consumers and health care professionals.

Stakeholders and Craft Beer Tourism Development

“…The message explained the objectives and purpose of the study, and also included an invitation for recipients to complete an online questionnaire, following a link located in the body of the message. While online questionnaires are known for achieving modest responses (Bardach et al, 2015), the online option was chosen in view of various limitations, such as lack of resources to travel and visit different craft brewers individually, make long-distance telephone calls, or email paper questionnaires by mail. However, researchers (Tang, Amran, & Goh 2014) also report modest response rates using questionnaires sent by post and email.…”

“…First, despite complementing the data collection process with face-to-face and telephone interviews, which proved very useful for this first comparative study across countries, the overall number of participants is limited, and does not allow for making generalizations about the craft brewing industry or CBT. While online data collection can often produce low response rates (Bardach et al, 2015), given some of the challenges faced in this study, future cross-regional or cross-country research could follow a similar approach, complementing and enriching the data with short face-to-face interviews. Second, while the study had an international focus, more countries could have been targeted; future investigations could consider this alternative.…”

Wineries' contribution to the local community: a stakeholder view

“…Given existing budget constraints the latter two alternatives were ruled out, and while there is evidence of various limitations of online questionnaire data gathering (Bardach, Hibbard, Greaves, and Dudley, 2015;Manfreda et al, 2008;Shih and Fan, 2008), this medium was chosen. Earlier wine business research has also adopted this data collection method (e.g., Johnson and Bruwer, 2007;McCutcheon, Bruwer and Li, 2009).…”

Increasing Consumer Engagement by Tailoring a Public Reporting Website on the Quality of Diabetes Care: A Qualitative Study

“…Yet, studies suggest that consumers do not seek out this information, understand it, trust it, or know how to use it [7,8]. Promising strategies to increase consumer engagement in public reports are to improve the design [9,10], include patient narrative [11-14], and to tailor metrics to reflect the concerns and preferences of individual consumers [15]. It has been shown that the absence of tailoring in public reports makes them unlikely to succeed [16,17] and that consumers are deterred by the content and design of current reports that lack tailoring to their individual needs [18].…”