Patient guide to patient experience surveys and ratings

At HealthPartners and Park Nicollet, we value the relationship we have with our patients and their loved ones. We work to provide you with the information needed to make informed decisions about your health care. This includes information about the doctors you choose to care for you throughout your life. To do that, we now post our doctors’ patient experience ratings and comments online. To help you understand how we capture and report our patient experience ratings, we created this guide to help patients, family members and those considering appointments with our doctors.

About our survey

We work to make sure that you have an exceptional experience during every care interaction.

To ensure that we’re holding ourselves to the highest standards, HealthPartners and Park Nicollet partners with NRC Health. NRC Health is an independent, leading company in the patient experience industry. NRC Health provides the technology and expertise to administer our patient surveys and to display ratings and comments on our doctor profile pages.

Who receives the survey?

The survey is sent to a patient the day following their clinic visit. We use this feedback to improve and enhance the care we offer.

Do you post all comments?

We’re committed to transparency. That means posting all relevant feedback – whether it’s positive or negative. However, we don’t post comments that are libelous, profane or those that risk the privacy of our patients.

What questions do we ask?

We asks patients to respond to multiple questions about specific aspects of the care they received. A doctor’s star rating is calculated based on responses to these questions:

  • Did this provider explain things in a way that was easy to understand?
  • Did this provider listen carefully to you?
  • Did this provider seem to know the important information about your medical history?
  • Did this provider show respect for what you had to say?
  • Did this provider spend enough time with you?
  • Did you trust this provider with your care?
  • Using any number from 0 to 10, where 0 is the worst provider possible and 10 is the best provider possible, what number would you use to rate this provider?

Why don't we see patient ratings and comments for every doctor?

Best practices in the industry make it clear that more data provides more accurate information.

That’s why we require a minimum of 30 completed patient surveys before posting a doctor’s star rating and comments online.

Can anyone complete a survey or post a comment about a doctor?

Only patients who’ve had a clinic visit with a HealthPartners and Park Nicollet doctor will receive a survey. The results are entirely calculated from information provided by patients who actually interacted with one of our doctors.

How is patient information protected?

We don’t display patient names in the online ratings and comments. All personally identifiable information is removed before displaying the ratings and comments.