23 Mar User-Generated Social Media May Reflect Hospital Quality
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. McKinley Glover IV, MD, MHS Department of Radiology
Massachusetts General Hospital,
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Glover: An increasing number of hospitals and health systems utilize social media as a way to connect with healthcare consumers. The simplicity of social media as a healthcare information resource—in comparison to more challenging and conflicting modes of public reporting of healthcare quality data—may add value for consumers seeking to make healthcare decisions. The correlation between ratings on social media and more conventional hospital quality metrics remains largely unclear, raising concern that
healthcare consumers may make decisions on inaccurate or inappropriate information regarding quality. The purpose of this study was to determine whether hospitals with lower readmission rates were more likely to have higher ratings on Facebook than hospitals with high readmission rates.
The study found that hospitals in which patients were less likely to have unplanned readmissions within the 30 days after discharge had higher Facebook ratings than were those with higher readmission rates. “Since user-generated social media feedback appears to be reflective of patient outcomes, hospitals and health care leaders should not underestimate social media’s value in developing quality improvement programs.”
MedicalResearch: What should clinicians and patients take away from your report?
Dr. Glover: Since user-generated social media feedback appears to be reflective of patient outcomes, hospitals and health care leaders should not underestimate social media’s value in developing quality improvement programs. This research adds support to the idea that social media has quantitative value in assessing healthcare quality domains including patient satisfaction and outcomes.
Hospitals should be aware that social media ratings may influence patient perceptions of hospitals and potentially their health care choices. Hospitals and other healthcare organizations should also be aware of the potential message they send by not using social media. Members of the general public should be encouraged to provide accurate feedback on their health care experiences via social media, but should not rely solely on such ratings to make their health care decisions.
MedicalResearch: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?
Dr. Glover: Continuing to develop quality measures that are understandable and accessible to patients is important in order to ensure that measures on social media do not become overvalued, given inherent biases related to online ratings. Further, the incorporation of social media and other online tools that allow consumers to provide feedback on their healthcare experiences within existing quality measurement programs warrants further investigation.
Citation:
Hospital Evaluations by Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of Facebook Ratings among Performance Outliers
Glover M1, Khalilzadeh O, Choy G, Prabhakar AM, Pandharipande PV, Gazelle GS.
J Gen Intern Med. 2015 Mar 7. [Epub ahead of print]
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with:, & Dr. McKinley Glover IV, MD, MHS (2015). User-Generated Social Media May Reflect Hospital Quality MedicalResearch.com
Last Updated on March 23, 2015 by Marie Benz MD FAAD