Realtime Patient Feedback through Social Media

“Results and analysis of patient feedback needs to be made available to all stakeholders in as near ‘real time’ as possible”

Robert Francis

Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Inquiry 2013

Why measure patient experience?

Patients who have a positive experience of healthcare are

• more likely to trust their clinicians (Keating et al 2002)

• more likely to follow treatment recommendations (Haynes et al 2008)

• less likely to die following a major clinical event (Glickman et al 2010).

Why is it important to regulators?

• Understand current problems in care delivery

• Quickly spot trends and identify major risks to the quality and safety

• Smoke detector of patient safety and quality of care

Traditional measures of patient experience

• ask limited questions (Loeb 2004)

• conducted infrequently (Reeves and Seccombe 2008)

• expensive to administer (Health Foundation 2013)

• Liking

• Following

• Linking

• Tagging

• Stumbling

Social media is changing the nature of health relatedinteractions

Capturing patient experience through social media

• 44% of patients are likely to share health experiences via social media (PWC 2012)

• Facebook “Likes” have a strong negative association with 30-day mortality rates (Timian et al 2013)

• an early warning of poor clinical care for regulators (Greaves et al 2013)

Research Question

How can healthcare regulators use patient experience captured through social media to

detect poor performance and identify areas for improvement?

Sub-Questions

•What systems are currently used by healthcare regulators to capture realtime patient feedback?

•What are the enablers and barriers to using patient feedback captured through social media?

•What are the views and opinions of patients, clinicians and regulators on this type of data capture?

•Could this type of information provide an early warning of quality and safety issues?

Methodology

Stage 1: A mixed methods exploratory study to elicit perceptions, attitudes, understanding and motivation of healthcare regulators in the use of social media analysis to capture realtime patient experience of healthcare.

• Online survey of healthcare regulators in UK, EU and USA

• Semi-structured key informant interviews and focus group discussion with healthcare stakeholders

• Focus group session with Healthcare Improvement Scotland Public Partner Group to explore their views on use of patients’ social media comments to inform healthcare regulators.

Methodology

Stage 2:

Pilot a small scale test, using sentiment analysis tools, to assess

• the feasibility of capturing realtime patient experience from social networking sites

• the relevance and utility of this information in supporting the safety and quality of healthcare

• the effectiveness of this analysis in identifying the textual signals and separating out the signal from the noise

Questions & Queries

• Scope

• Methodology

• Ethics