PEP Health – Tackling the Issue of Trust

PEP Health’s Bold Bet on Trust

PEP Health is on an ambitious journey, and they’re going all in.

The last time Hospitalogists and I sat down with PEP Health, they were already going down a kinda crazy, bold path: redefining what quality means in healthcare. In that first intro to PEP Health, they were taking their first steps into working with payors, health systems, and risk-bearing orgs to create a better, data-driven definition for patient experience and quality using real-time data from millions of sources – their PEP Score. Today, PEP Health collects and analyzes enough information to have a PEP Score for every single healthcare facility location (clinic, hospital, etc.) across the U.S.

Since then, PEP Health has grown in sophistication, commercializing its product with large enterprise players (thanks solely to the Hospitalogy Effect of course) and making significant inroads into incorporating their proprietary PEP Score – a much closer measure of true quality – into real results for healthcare organizations, both on the payor and provider sides. The PEP Health all-in-one dashboard allows for teams to track their patient experience measures in real time:

• They’ve painstakingly and carefully validated their PEP Score against standard industry quality measures like HEDIS and HCAHPS, giving organizations leveraging the PEP Health platform a huge, leading advantage and an early warning system to course correct (up to 9 months in advance).
• Hospitals and health systems are leveraging PEP Health’s Scores and platform to understand in real time how their patient experience and quality Scores are trending. In an era of rising consumerism, these metrics are more important than ever. PEP Health’s data is tied much closer to comprehensive, real-time patient experience and sentiment, a much preferable and actionable alternative to lagging, costly information from force-fed patient surveys. This more timely data means hospitals can make more targeted investments into areas that tangibly move the needle for their patients’ experience and feedback.
  • Our (PEP Health’s) model doesn’t stop at identifying broad experience categories like “access to care.” Instead, it breaks down each domain into granular subdomains that reveal actionable insights. Take the Fast Access domain, for example. Traditional surveys might report low satisfaction with access, but provide no clarity on what’s driving that perception. We can isolate whether the issue lies in booking and scheduling, wait times for appointments, delays once onsite, or difficulty connecting with the right staff. This level of specificity allows providers to target the exact point of friction—adjust staffing, modify scheduling workflows, or triage intake more efficiently—improving the patient experience in a way that survey-based data simply can’t support.
• PEP Health also offers a fresh take on hospital rankings – not based on surveys or clinical metrics, but entirely on what patients are saying online, shining a spotlight on hospitals that provide exceptional experiences in the eyes of patients. PEP Health can segment down rankings from there, measuring performance across domains, service lines, market areas, and more.

I strongly believe before too long we’re going to start seeing PEP Health Scores – and other much more sophisticated quality and patient experience measures – make their way into enterprise contracts as new KPIs and industry standards for quality, tied to bonus and performative payouts. A universal, validated patient experience metric. With certain PEP Health clients, they already are leveraging PEP Scores in value-based agreements.

But this essay isn’t about PEP Health’s great first foray into the ethereal shroud of patient experience and quality. It’s about a much more difficult topic, and one at the core of our massive, way-too-complex healthcare industry.

Trust.

Healthcare’s Trust Issues

Trust in the healthcare industry is at an all-time low. While the doctor’s office used to be a beacon of trust and security, public trust in our institutions has eroded as a result of social media and misinformation overload along with political polarization and tribalism. Within the healthcare industry itself, patients deal with frustrating administrative and financial complexity, fringe beliefs like vaccine skepticism, and poor experiences with patient care including bad, patronizing communication from medical professionals. As a result, since 2021, trust in medical doctors dropped 14%. That’s the lowest number since the mid 1990s according to Gallup.

The good news is that relative to other industries and institutions, trust in healthcare professionals is still relatively high. But the trend overall isn’t great. Nurses, pharmacists, and medical doctors who really for the most part are just trying to do their jobs and help patients get the care they need should NOT be losing ground to this degree.

In 2025, no matter your beliefs and without getting overly political, we’re seeing certain historically fringe ideals like the MAHA or the crunchy mom movement directly attack what they consider to be the medical industrial complex, and the food industry to boot. Executive orders have provided directives around increasing the mortality rate in the U.S., address the rise in chronic disease, research the rise of diagnoses like ADHD and prevalence of prescription drugs, or vaccine skepticism.

What am I getting at here?

Healthcare organizations have to deal with this rise in mistrust plaguing (pun fully intended) the industry. Patients are now equipped with AI and medical information. They’re frustrated, and discuss the healthcare industry’s shortcomings online. So PEP Health sees this trust issue as a huge problem to be solved for their payor and health system client base.

We need better communication, and we need to rebuild trust in healthcare institutions. Broken trust leads to patients not showing up or adhering to medication, leading to poor experiences and worse outcomes, compounding the trust problem.

But we can’t do that unless we know WHERE the breakdowns are happening. And this is where PEP Health, with its new data-driven, AI-enabled Trust Score, steps in.

Introducing PEP Health’s new Trust Score

Launched in 2025, PEP Health’s Trust Score is a first-of-its kind metric measuring how patients experience and express trust in healthcare.

Similar to its PEP Score, PEP Health’s Trust Score offers a fresh – and refreshing – take on hospital rankings and trustworthiness. Not based on ‘pay to play’ or surveys where you pull patients’ teeth to complete, but rather entirely based on sentiment from online conversations across millions of datapoints.

How does trust move the needle for a payor or health system’s operating performance? Patients / members are:

• More loyal and willing to be navigated within your system or network;
• More likely to seek primary care services from your network;
• More willing to share their information openly and engage with you;
• More likely to follow designed treatment plans and adhere to medication;
• Less likely to go to the ER or be re-admitted to the hospital;
• More likely to experience a positive health outcome

So in summary…better engagement, higher retention / loyalty, and better outcomes when trust is built. Funny how that works, eh? Without trust, which is foundational to our society and relationships at large, patients don’t show up, open up, or follow up.

The ROI is clear.

For payors or risk-bearing organizations, you’re able to drive members to trusted, high-value care because you can build better trust and communication pathways with your members. And trusting patients are more likely to go for early intervention or preventive measures rather than waiting until their conditions grow more serious in complexity and therefore expensive. 

For hospitals and health systems, you’re able to differentiate your service offerings based on lived patient experiences and more effectively invest capital into areas that create loyalty and retention in a new era of consumerism in 2025.

For both, healthcare enterprises are able to align their missions and business outcomes around a transparent, patient-centered measure in the Trust Score that drives better engagement, outcomes, and retention.

Peeking under the Technology Hood with PEP Health

It’s always great to take a behind-the-scenes look into the actual nuance of how technology gets built, and it was fascinating to learn how the tech works alongside PEP Health’s engineering and technology teams.

I’ll let the PEP Health team take over for a sec to explain more about how their natural language processing and machine learning models do the trick to calibrate effective, reliable Trust scoring:

• Methodology:
  • The Trust Score methodology is inspired by Francis Frei’s Trust Triangle framework, meaning trust is foundationally built upon authenticity, competency, and emotional connection. If any of these fail, then trust is broken.
• Components of our approach:
  • Trust is often mentioned implicitly – people don’t always SAY “I trust…” so, we look for “Indicators” of Trust to calculate our Trust Score, including things like mentions of retention, gratitude, and recommendations
  • We also look for “Drivers” of Trust to better understand what drives Trust overall – these are factors like Respect, Helpfulness, Care & Treatment, Kindness, and Attentiveness.
• How it works:
  • Our expert language team annotates comments that fall into one of the Drivers or Indicators of trust
  • We use this data to train ML / NLP models to automatically flag these parts of text
  • As each comment is collected, the models flag specific spans of text for relevance to these topics, and assign a sentiment score 1-5 for the span of text
  • The Trust Score – and scores for the individual Driver/Indicator components – are calculated based on the above inputs
  • Trust Scores are calculated for each and every healthcare location (clinic, hospital, etc.) and health system. Scores are calculated based on a 90-day rolling average and updated daily. 
  • The same approach is applied to all systems, allowing benchmarking between different systems as well as within systems themselves so teams can understand where they stack up versus their competition when it comes to trust and experience

Put your Trust in PEP Health

PEP Health is well on its way to redefining patient experience and trust in healthcare, two of the trickiest and notorious datapoints to track, and one that leaders across the nation care so deeply about understanding its effects and impacts on their respective organizations.

To me, for those reasons, it’s a no brainer to engage with PEP Health, if just to see their great demo, and where you stack up on their proprietary Trust Score rankings. Plus, it’ll help me look good (and PEP Health’s is a mission I strongly believe in) 🙂

For Hospitalogists, I’ve been given permission to share a special, exclusive offer to subscribers. You can apply for early access to PEP Health’s Trust Score Pilot to get ahead of the game here. It’ll only be available for a limited time, so hop on that quickly!

For more info on all things PEP Health and to schedule a broader platform demo, you can get in touch with the team here. I highly recommend doing so to understand your trust and patient experience like never before.

Get in touch with PEP Health today.

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