Twitter Reveals Hospital Quality

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

According to researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital, Twitter can be a valuable resource when it comes to measuring hospital quality.

Using more than 400,000 public tweets directed toward the Twitter accounts of about 2,400 U.S. hospitals between 2012 and 2013, researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital determined that tweets can, in fact, provide valuable data for judging hospital quality.

According to iHealth Beat, 34,735 — or 9.4 percent — of those tweets were related to patient experience.

“The main problems with measuring patient experience by survey are the small numbers of people who respond to surveys and the lag time,” wrote lead researcher Jared Hawkins of Boston Children's Hospital's Computational Health Informatics Program in a study announcement emailed to FierceHealthcare. “It can take up to two years before survey data are released to the public.”

Hospitals with at least 50 such tweets were more likely to:

• have fewer Medicare patients than the national median
• have a higher nurse-to-patient ratio than the national median
• be a not-for-profit hospital

“We were able to capture what people were happy or mad about, in an unsolicited way,” Hawkins said. “No one else is looking at patient experience this way because surveys ask very targeted questions. Unsurprisingly, you get back very targeted, narrow answers.”

Researchers noted no relationship between the sentiment of tweets and information from Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, but they did note that the data indicated Twitter's potential to be used to supplement HCAHPS.