Exploratory analysis of patient satisfaction from mining social media

Cristian Bologa
November 19, 2015

Primary question of interest

  • Question: What are the factors that have the biggest influence on the patient experience when visiting a medical business (hospital, clinic, private practice, etc) and what a medical business should do to improve that experience?
  • Potential target audiences
    • First line medical providers (physicians, nurses, etc),
    • Hospitals and clinics administrators
    • Medical insurance companies
    • Healthcare policy makers

Methodology

  • reading json files (jsonlite)
  • text mining (tm, RWeka)
    • convert to lower case
    • remove numbers
    • remove common English stopwords
    • remove punctuation
    • strip white spaces
  • exploratory data analysis (PLS method - caret)
  • statistical inference (Wilcoxon rank-sum test)

Results

n mean pValue
made.feel.comfortable 72 4.7 0.0000000
takes.time.listen 37 4.7 0.0000049
makes.feel.comfortable 40 4.7 0.0000140
time.answer.questions 44 4.5 0.0000076
staff.super.friendly 22 4.9 0.0000639
office.staff.friendly 60 4.2 0.0007551
staff.friendly.helpful 32 4.5 0.0007706
really.cares.patients 21 4.7 0.0007441
made.feel.ease 19 4.7 0.0022958
really.takes.time 18 4.7 0.0019582

Table 1. Top terms associated with positive reviews, ordered by decreasing strength of association

Answer to the primary question

Most important factors for patient experience

  • physicians
    • good bedside manners (+)
    • take time to know their patients (+)
    • listen to them and answer all questions (+)
  • office staff
    • friendly, professional, helpful (+)
    • perceived as rude (-)
    • does not return calls (-)
    • patient has to call insurance (-)
  • waste of patient's time (-)