Patient hospital experience and satisfaction on social media

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to show the value of open-ended narrative patient reviews on social media for elucidating aspects of hospital patient satisfaction.

Design/methodology/approach

Mixed methods analyses using qualitative (manual content analyses using grounded theory and algorithmic analyses using the Natural Language Toolkit) followed by quantitative analyses (negative binomial regression).

Findings

Health-care team communication, health-care team action orientation and patient hospital room environment are positively related to patient hospital satisfaction. Patients form their hospital satisfaction perceptions based on the three facets of their hospital stay experience.

Research limitations/implications

In the spirit of continuous quality improvement, periodically analyzing patient social media comments could help health-care teams understand the patient satisfaction inhibitors that they need to avoid to offer patient-centric care.

Practical implications

By periodically analyzing patient social media comments hospital leaders can quickly identify the gaps in their health service delivery and plug them, which could ultimately give the hospital a competitive advantage.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to apply mixed methods to patient hospital review comments given freely on social media to critically understand what drives patient hospital satisfaction ratings.

Citation

Chakraborty, S. and Church, E.M. (2021), "Patient hospital experience and satisfaction on social media", International Journal of Quality and Service Sciences, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 417-432. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJQSS-02-2020-0014