College of Dental Medicine, Western University of Health Sciences, Pomona, CA, United States.
College of Health and Human Services, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, United States.
J Med Internet Res. 2020 Jul 7;22(7):e18652. doi: 10.2196/18652.
Over the last two decades, patient review websites have emerged as an essential online platform for doctor ratings and reviews. Recent studies suggested the significance of such websites as a data source for patients to choose doctors for healthcare providers to learn and improve from patient feedback and to foster a culture of trust and transparency between patients and healthcare providers. However, as compared to other medical specialties, studies of online patient reviews that focus on dentists in the United States remain absent.
This study sought to understand to what extent online patient reviews can provide performance feedbacks that reflect dental care quality and patient experience.
Using mixed informatics methods incorporating statistics, natural language processing, and domain expert evaluation, we analyzed the online patient reviews of 204,751 dentists extracted from HealthGrades with two specific aims. First, we examined the associations between patient ratings and a variety of dentist characteristics. Second, we identified topics from patient reviews that can be mapped to the national assessment of dental patient experience measured by the Patient Experience Measures from the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Dental Plan Survey.
Higher ratings were associated with female dentists (t=2.45, P<.01, g=0.01), dentists at a younger age (F=246.97, P<.001, g=0.11), and those whose patients experienced a short wait time (F=10417.77, P<0.001, g=0.18). We also identified several topics that corresponded to CAHPS measures, including discomfort (eg, painful/painless root canal or deep cleaning), and ethics (eg, high-pressure sales, and unnecessary dental work).
These findings suggest that online patient reviews could be used as a data source for understanding the patient experience and healthcare quality in dentistry.
在过去的二十年中，患者评论网站已成为医生评分和评论的重要在线平台。最近的研究表明，这些网站作为患者选择医生的数据源的重要性，为医疗服务提供者提供了从患者反馈中学习和改进的机会，并促进了患者和医疗服务提供者之间的信任和透明文化。然而，与其他医学专业相比，关于美国牙医的在线患者评论研究仍然缺乏。
本研究旨在了解在线患者评论在多大程度上可以提供反映牙科护理质量和患者体验的绩效反馈。
使用混合信息学方法，结合统计学、自然语言处理和领域专家评估，我们分析了从 HealthGrades 提取的 204751 名牙医的在线患者评论，有两个具体目标。首先，我们检查了患者评分与各种牙医特征之间的关联。其次，我们从患者评论中确定了可以映射到国家评估的主题，该评估是通过医疗保健提供者和系统消费者评估（CAHPS）牙科计划调查中的患者体验措施来衡量的。
更高的评分与女性牙医（t=2.45，P<.01，g=0.01）、年轻牙医（F=246.97，P<.001，g=0.11）和等待时间短的患者的牙医有关（F=10417.77，P<0.001，g=0.18）。我们还确定了几个与 CAHPS 测量值相对应的主题，包括不适（例如，根管治疗或深度清洁时的疼痛/无痛）和道德（例如，高压销售和不必要的牙科工作）。
这些发现表明，在线患者评论可以用作理解牙科患者体验和医疗保健质量的数据源。
