Social media hospital ratings and HCAHPS survey scores.

PURPOSE

To empirically verify whether patient hospital satisfaction ratings on social media such as Yelp provide similar information as the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) surveys.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: OLS and ordinal regressions performed on secondary data obtained from Yelp.com and 2016 Hospital Compare database disclosed by CMS.

FINDINGS

Results show that the patient hospital satisfaction ratings from Yelp can predict the patient experience of care domain scores obtained through the annual HCAHPS surveys and are also positively and significantly correlated to the overall hospital quality performance scores given by CMS.

RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS: Study suggests that social media patient review information could be used to supplement the information obtained from HCAHPS surveys, thereby providing hospitals more accurate information about their patient experiences.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

Hospital leaders need not wait an entire year to receive their HCHAPS scores to know about the issues related to their patient experience that need improvement and can periodically refer to free Yelp patient review scores on Yelp.com to obtain similar information.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE: To the best of knowledge, this research is the first to empirically demonstrate that patient reviews freely obtained from social media sites like Yelp can provide similar information as obtained from HCAHPS surveys and can thus be used to supplement HCAHPS.