Beyond Patient Experience Surveys: Leveraging Social Media to Glean Patient Feedback

Information on patients' experience of their care is a foundational aspect of healthcare quality.1 Although survey tools to help measure patient satisfaction have been available to providers and researchers for decades, the introduction of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services survey, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), created a consistent national standard for measuring patient experience. HCAHPS provides consumers with a valid platform to compare hospitals, with detailed data for providers to help improve the quality of care and increase transparency around outcomes and processes.2 However, focusing on HCAHPS alone is not enough to improve patients' perceptions of care. Although surveys and interviews provide insight into consumer perceptions of care, increasingly, patients extensively share their experiences on the Internet via social media in the form of blogs, likes, posts, and tweets, providing large amounts of readily accessible data to qualitatively augment formal quantitative survey approaches.3