Measuring patient satisfaction with medical services using social media generated data

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the results of an effort to use social media generated data for measuring patient satisfaction with medical care services. Traditionally, scientifically designed patient satisfaction surveys are used to provide such measurements. The goal here is to evaluate the possibility of supplementing patient satisfaction surveys with social media generated patient satisfaction measurements such that the later can be used either as validation or replacement for the former. Although surveys are scientifically designed to yield dependable results, recent studies have revealed multiple factors relating to the methods currently used for survey data collection, that may be contributing to the limitations of many survey results. In light of such criticisms, this study explored the possibility of using the increasing popular and proactively generated consumer ratings through the pervasive social media as data source for satisfaction measurement. The average satisfaction scores created from such data are then used to compare levels of satisfaction among five types of health service businesses. Design/methodology/approach The data used in this research are garnered from the consumer review social media site called “Yelp!”. Ratings and reviews that are related to health and medical services were extracted from the “Yelp!” database. The types of services that are identified by consumers are standardized to typologies that are traditionally used in health service research. Five types of services were targeted – general practice physician offices, physician specialty services, dentists, hospitals and physical therapy services. The “five-star” rating systems were re-coded to form a five-point ordinal scale variable to represent “satisfaction score”. Findings The Yelp! data-based measurement of patient satisfaction produced an overall satisfaction score of 3.8 (SD=1.7) for the sampled services. The average satisfaction score per type of service ranged from 3.16 (SD=1.83) for specialty physicians to 4.52 (SD=1.57) for physical therapists. In general, dentists and physical therapists received higher average satisfaction scores as compared to the other medical services. Research limitations/implications Because this study was meant to evaluate the utility of social media generated data to measure satisfaction, in general, the estimates cannot be construed as representative of any underlying geographically defined population. They, however, do have a “cohort” interpretability. This limitation is not inherent to the use of the data source. If some geographically identifiable representation of the measurement data is desired, identifiable business data can be generated from the Yelp! system to specifically target relevant populations following the method that are tested in this study. Practical implications Under certain circumstances, such as the size and maturity of the gathered data, social media generated data can be a useful as a “fortuitous” alternative to satisfaction surveys for evaluating patient satisfaction with medical care. This is propitious as there have been some indication by studies that the advent of communication media in the twenty-first century may be undermining the reliability of scientifically designed surveys. Originality/value The use of social media generated data as “alternative” or “secondary” data source for research use is currently being widely investigated. To the author’s knowledge, this is the only paper that evaluated the use of “Yelp!” data as a possible source for population-based formal satisfaction measurement for healthcare services.