Do Facebook Ratings Accurately Reflect Hospitals' Quality Of Care?

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Study: Hospitals' Readmission Rates Correlate With Facebook Ratings

There appears to be a direct correlation between how hospitals are rated on Facebook’s five-star system and how well they perform on widely-used measures of quality care, finds a study published by The Journal of General Internal Medicine. Hospital Evaluations by Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of Facebook Ratings among Performance Outliers was designed to assess how hospitals' 30-day readmission rates related to their Facebook star ratings.

Since late 2013, Facebook has given organizations the option of allowing users to rate them using a five-star system. For the study, researchers analyzed 30-day readmission data available on CMS' Hospital Compare website for 4,800 U.S. hospitals.

“We found that the 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,” lead author McKinley Glover, MD, MHS, a clinical fellow in the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Department of Radiology, said in a release. “Since user-generated social media feedback appears to be reflective of patient outcomes, hospitals and healthcare leaders should not underestimate social media’s value in developing quality improvement programs.”

Co-author Garry Choy, MD, MBA, an MGH radiologist who also is assistant chief medical information officer of advanced technologies at the Mass. General Physicians Organization, added, “As we embrace data analytics to better drive how we deliver care at a systems level, this study shows there is opportunity and significant value in sentiment analysis – the use of social media data to track public opinion –as it pertains to healthcare.”

The data showed that more than 80 percent of hospitals had rates in the expected national average range; 8 percent had rates significantly above average; and 7 percent had rates significantly below average. It further revealed:

• 93 percent of low-readmission hospitals had Facebook pages;
• 82 percent of high-readmission hospitals had Facebook pages; and
• Overall, more than 80 percent of low- and high-readmission hospitals with Facebook pages offered the Facebook ratings option.

According to the study, for each one-star increase in a facility's Facebook rating there was a correlated more than five-fold increase in the likelihood that the hospital would fall into the low readmission group, PsychCentral reports. Readmission rates did not appear to be tied to other data on hospitals' Facebook pages, including the number of “likes” a hospital page had; how long a hospital’s page had existed; or the number of times users reported they have visited the hospital.

“While we can’t say conclusively that social media ratings are fully representative of the actual quality of care, this research adds support to the idea that social media has quantitative value in assessing the areas of patient satisfaction – something we are hoping to study next – and other quality outcomes,” says Glover. “Hospitals should be aware that social media ratings may influence patient perceptions of hospitals and potentially their healthcare 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 healthcare experiences via social media, but should not rely solely on such ratings to make their healthcare decisions.”