Patient Satisfaction with Medical Services Received at Different Healthcare Settings

In this presentation the following topics are disussed

• What is the goal of and what are the reasons for conducting this study
• What methods are used to conduct this study
• What are the findings of this study
• What can we conclude from this study

The main goal of this study is to determine if “Yelp” data can be used to produce results that are reported in past scientific studies about patient satisfaction.

• Through a literature review, it was determined that prior studies all of which used survey data, show that patient satisfaction for medical care services is high - no matter what health care setting (i.e., service type) the care is given under.
• Surveys are scientifically designed - whereas “Yelp” data are collected without any design or model in mind. In other words they are just out there
• If survey results can be replicated using secondary data such as the “Yelp” data, the potential implication for using one to validate the other - or for using one in lieu of the other is feasible

This study used the “Yelp” data that was made available for “Yelp Data Challenge Round 6”

• The raw data was imported into a data table such that it can be analyzed using a statistical method
• Ratings of health services are isolated from the rest of business ratings for the analysis
• After variables are inspected for adequacy for modeling, a one-way analysis of variance was used to evaluate average ratings across four types of healthcare providers
• The ANOVA model was fit via the aov() function as follows:

healthcareSettings.aov<- aov(stars ~ service_type, data = health_services)
summary(healthcareSettings.aov)

The result of the study is summarized on the following graph that shows the result of Tukey's HSD test result (post-hoc comparison after the null hypothesis of the ANOVA is rejected)

              Df Sum Sq Mean Sq F value Pr(>F)    
NA             3    587   195.5   69.72 <2e-16 ***
Residuals   3517   9862     2.8                   
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

• After the test that was shown in the previous page a post-hoc multiple comparison was performed to see the pattern of differences between means of the different healthcare settings.
• Accordingly, there were no statistically significant differences between three out of four healthcare settings - in terms of average scores that they got from their patients that rated them on “Yelp”
• However, we see that dentists are consistently rated higher than all the other health care providers.
• Prior studies that show equality between satisfaction ratings of healthcare services (that I reviewed), did not include dentists. Therefore how dentists would compare to other health care providers in surveys is not known.
• In summary then, the “Yelp” data had sufficiently reproduced the result that is typically known to exist on the basis of survey research.
• Further (future) studies should corroborate these findings