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Electronic word-of-mouth increasingly shapes the online reputation of healthcare facilities and patient choice, but ratings and reviews may reflect experiences, expectations, selection bias, and manipulation and therefore cannot be treated as direct measures of clinical quality. To analyse e-WOM characteristics, relationships between online reputation, trust, and healthcare facility choice, and the associated biases, ethical risks, and organizational response governance. This systematic literature review followed PRISMA 2020. Publications from January 2013 through 14 September 2026 were searched in PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar, supplemented by backward and forward citation searching. Of 1,466 records identified, 30 publications were included in the narrative and framework syntheses. Study quality was appraised using appropriate JBI tools, MMAT, or AMSTAR 2 according to design. Eight themes were identified: review valence and volume; quality of experience narratives; reviewer credibility and verification; ratings of facilities and healthcare professionals; organizational responses and service recovery; trust as a mediator of choice; representation bias and manipulation; and relationships between reputation and actual quality. Valence, volume, recency, narrative detail, and source credibility influenced patient appraisal and consideration sets. Appropriate organizational responses could support service recovery but had to protect privacy and avoid disclosing patient information. Associations between ratings and actual quality were inconsistent because of extremity bias, user representativeness, organizational confounding, and limited visit verification. Causal evidence on actual choice and utilization remained limited. The e-WOM Reputation-to-Choice Pathway links experience, reviews, visibility, appraisal, trust, consideration sets, choice, and quality feedback. Healthcare facilities should verify reviews, respond ethically, monitor narrative patterns, and connect online reputation with patient-experience and objective quality data. Because the PRISMA counts were retrospectively reconstructed, all figures must be verified against the original search logs and selection records before submission.
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Syahrif et al. (2026) studied this question.
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