Measuring patient-perceived quality of care in US hospitals using Twitter
View/ Open
Author
Tuli, Gaurav
Runels, Tessa
Broecker, Katherine
Nsoesie, Elaine O
McIver, David J
Greaves, Felix
Note: Order does not necessarily reflect citation order of authors.
Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2015-004309Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Hawkins, J. B., J. S. Brownstein, G. Tuli, T. Runels, K. Broecker, E. O. Nsoesie, D. J. McIver, et al. 2016. “Measuring patient-perceived quality of care in US hospitals using Twitter.” BMJ Quality & Safety 25 (6): 404-413. doi:10.1136/bmjqs-2015-004309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2015-004309.Abstract
Background: Patients routinely use Twitter to share feedback about their experience receiving healthcare. Identifying and analysing the content of posts sent to hospitals may provide a novel real-time measure of quality, supplementing traditional, survey-based approaches. Objective: To assess the use of Twitter as a supplemental data stream for measuring patient-perceived quality of care in US hospitals and compare patient sentiments about hospitals with established quality measures. Design: 404 065 tweets directed to 2349 US hospitals over a 1-year period were classified as having to do with patient experience using a machine learning approach. Sentiment was calculated for these tweets using natural language processing. 11 602 tweets were manually categorised into patient experience topics. Finally, hospitals with ≥50 patient experience tweets were surveyed to understand how they use Twitter to interact with patients. Key results Roughly half of the hospitals in the US have a presence on Twitter. Of the tweets directed toward these hospitals, 34 725 (9.4%) were related to patient experience and covered diverse topics. Analyses limited to hospitals with ≥50 patient experience tweets revealed that they were more active on Twitter, more likely to be below the national median of Medicare patients (p<0.001) and above the national median for nurse/patient ratio (p=0.006), and to be a non-profit hospital (p<0.001). After adjusting for hospital characteristics, we found that Twitter sentiment was not associated with Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) ratings (but having a Twitter account was), although there was a weak association with 30-day hospital readmission rates (p=0.003). Conclusions: Tweets describing patient experiences in hospitals cover a wide range of patient care aspects and can be identified using automated approaches. These tweets represent a potentially untapped indicator of quality and may be valuable to patients, researchers, policy makers and hospital administrators.Other Sources
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4878682/pdf/Terms of Use
This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAACitable link to this page
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:27662283
Collections
- HMS Scholarly Articles [17928]
- SPH Scholarly Articles [6362]
Contact administrator regarding this item (to report mistakes or request changes)