At PEP Health, we believe patient experience is not just important, it is foundational to healthcare performance. When we introduced the PEP Score, our goal was to deliver real-time, validated insights into how patients experience care, using their own words shared across online platforms. As outlined in Beyond Surveys: Why Healthcare Needs a Universal, Validated Patient Experience Metric, healthcare needs better tools to truly hear patients.
As our platform grew and captured tens of millions of authentic patient narratives, one theme consistently surfaced: trust.
Trust is everywhere in healthcare conversations. Patients rely on it. Providers strive to earn it. Payers need it to retain members and meet value-based goals. Yet until now, trust has been largely invisible to the systems that depend on it.
Why Trust Needed a Score
Trust is not abstract. It influences nearly every healthcare decision a patient makes, from whether to seek care, to following a treatment plan, to returning for future support. Despite its importance, healthcare has lacked a scalable and validated way to measure trust in real time.
That is why we created the Trust Score. It is the first real-time, evidence-based metric that quantifies how patients experience trust in their care. Developed in real-world settings with health systems managing diverse populations and challenges, the Trust Score provides a clear and measurable view of this critical performance factor.
“Trust is too important to be anecdotal,” said Dr. Mark Lomax, CEO of PEP Health. “The Trust Score gives healthcare leaders a measurable signal they can act on. It surfaces what matters most to patients and turns that into insight that drives better decisions.”
Learning from Other Industries
Industries like automotive, finance, and retail have long understood how to measure trust. They use proven systems to capture customer sentiment, loyalty, and advocacy in real time. JD Power rankings and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are well-known examples.
Healthcare has been slower to adapt. Yet patients now act more like consumers, researching providers, comparing experiences, and making decisions based on trust. They expect transparency, responsiveness, and follow-through.
PEP Health is helping healthcare close that gap. By measuring trust the way other industries measure satisfaction and loyalty, we give payers and providers the clarity to act, with the same speed and confidence customers already expect.
Built from the Authentic Voices of Patients
The Trust Score builds on the same validated foundation as the PEP Score. It uses AI and healthcare-specific natural language processing to analyze millions of unsolicited online patient narratives drawn from social media, review sites, and forums.
The methodology is grounded in the Francis Frei Trust Triangle, which defines trust as the intersection of three components:
- Authenticity — patients believe they are seeing the real you
- Logic — they believe in your competence and judgment
- Empathy — they believe you care about them and their well-being
When any of these elements breaks down, trust erodes. The Trust Score captures both:
- Drivers of trust, such as respect, communication, and involvement in decision-making
- Indicators of trust, including loyalty, gratitude, and willingness to return or recommend
ECU Health worked closely with PEP Health to refine the Trust Score, ensuring the model reflected both clinical realities and community expectations.
“Using the unprompted voices of patients to learn about trust feels like the ultimate way to respect and respond to what patients need from us,” said Dr. Julie Kennedy Oehlert, Chief Experience Officer at ECU Health. “Now we can finally see trust, measure it, and use it to make better decisions.”
Navigating Uncertainty with Actionable Insights
In today’s environment, delayed insight is not enough. Patients make care decisions based on trust, but most organizations do not recognize when trust starts to erode until it is already affecting outcomes.
The Trust Score helps healthcare leaders:
- Identify trust breakdowns before they impact ratings or revenue
- Benchmark trust across locations, service lines, and communities
- Detect disparities linked to geography, access, or social vulnerability
- Take action to reduce patient leakage and improve retention
These are not theoretical signals. They are real-time insights that support value-based care, improve member and patient engagement, and strengthen system performance.
Trust also matters inside the organization. Staff engagement is often tied to perceptions of fairness, shared purpose, and confidence in leadership. While other tools measure internal sentiment, PEP Health adds a broader view by capturing how trust is experienced at the community level, where patient behavior is shaped and long-term loyalty is built.
A New Standard for Healthcare Experience
Healthcare leaders are already using the Trust Score to:
- Track trust in real time
- Identify gaps across systems and service lines
- Surface disparities in how different groups experience care
- Build and protect patient and community trust before it declines
“The Trust Score is less about adding another metric and more about achieving a deeper understanding of healthcare relationships, which underpin every outcome we care about,” continued Dr. Kennedy Oehlert.
At PEP Health, we believe trust should be visible, measurable, and supported across every level of care. Now, for the first time, it can be.
Join the Leaders Making Trust Measurable
The Trust Score is already helping health systems and payers uncover blind spots, reduce risk, and build stronger relationships with the patients and communities they serve.
This is not just another metric. It is a strategic signal that reveals where trust is being earned, where it is at risk, and how it impacts outcomes, loyalty, and revenue.
Ready to take the next step?
- Download the white paper
The Missing Metric: Bringing Patient Trust into Focus - Apply for early access
See your organization’s Trust Score and turn trust into measurable performance.
By joining early access, you can establish baseline trust metrics before competitors, gaining a clearer view of where trust is being built or lost across their systems. These early insights allow leaders to identify and address trust gaps before they begin to affect contracts, performance, or patient behavior.
The next era of healthcare will belong to those who can measure what matters most. Trust is that foundation.
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