How Health Systems Are Using PEP Health’s Effective Treatment Insights
Every day, patients are telling us how they feel about their care and providers.
They talk about whether they felt listened to, how confident they were in staff abilities and decision-making, how well their pain or symptoms were managed, whether they followed their care plan, whether treatment was successful, and how recovery is going.
This feedback shows up every day in online reviews, forums, and social media, often long before it appears in survey results or outcomes data. However, it has been historically difficult to measure, standardize, and act on at scale.
PEP Health’s Effective Treatment domain changes that.
Powered by natural language processing and machine learning, it turns unsolicited patient feedback from across the web into actionable intelligence for payers and providers within 24 hours.
Instead of waiting months to understand how care performed, organizations can see how patients feel about quality, clinical competence, pain management, recovery, and treatment success almost immediately. That earlier visibility enables faster intervention, stronger performance, and better results in value-based care models.
How health systems are using Effective Treatment insights today
For healthcare leaders focused on care delivery, quality, and safety, Effective Treatment functions as a near-instant proxy for patient-reported outcomes.
Leading health systems like ECU Health, whose work with PEP Health was recently featured by Modern Healthcare (read the article here), are using them to inform physician reputation management.
Service line leaders use them to understand how clinical competence and care are experienced in real time, identify where care pathways are excelling or breaking down, and make meaningful changes to care delivery before issues become systemic.
Risk, safety, and quality teams use them to spot early signals of dissatisfaction that can lead to complications, non-adherence, safety events, patient churn, and reputational damage.
What Effective Treatment measures
The Effective Treatment domain reflects patient perceptions across three core dimensions.
- Professional Competency captures confidence in clinical expertise, judgment, and decision-making
- Care & Treatment reflects whether evidence-based interventions addressed patient needs and achieved their intended goals
- Pain Relief captures how effectively pain and discomfort were managed throughout the care journey
Together, these signals provide a patient-centered view of whether care was appropriate, effective, and successful, as experienced by the people receiving it.
Where Effective Treatment fits within the broader experience picture
Clinical expertise and appropriate care are foundational to healthcare outcomes.
There is growing evidence that how people feel about their care directly shapes how they engage with it at every stage, including whether they seek care early or delay it, how openly they share information with clinicians, and whether they attend appointments, accept treatment recommendations, follow care plans, recover as expected, and stick with a provider or health plan.
These decisions and factors have a direct impact on clinical outcomes, including better adherence to clinical guidance and treatment plans, stronger trust in providers, faster recovery times, avoidance of unnecessary ER visits, reduced readmissions, reduced safety and malpractice risks, and better overall health outcomes.
At the same time, Effective Treatment is only one part of the experience story. As patients increasingly act like consumers, their expectations extend beyond clinical care and competence alone. Access, communication, emotional support, continuity, the physical environment, and administrative experiences all shape choices and behavior.
Leading organizations understand how these dimensions interact and influence one another.
A validated, real-time signal of care quality
Effective Treatment is one of seven experience domains that contribute to a hospital’s real-time PEP Score. It has been validated through peer-review against HCAHPS, demonstrating strong alignment with HCAHPS outcomes and proving that unsolicited patient feedback can serve as a reliable, early indicator of care quality and outcomes.
This work has also been featured in Becker’s Hospital Review, highlighting its relevance for healthcare leaders navigating quality, safety, and value-based performance.
By amplifying real patient voices, where patients are already speaking online, PEP Health provides a transparent, experience-driven signal of how care is perceived as it is lived, not months later.
To find out how our insights can support your organization, email hello@pephealth.ai.
