Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Nov 16, 2019
Date Accepted: Apr 26, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Nov 2, 2020
Using Social Media to Investigate Geographic and Macro-Level Variations in LGBTQ Patient Experiences
ABSTRACT
Background:
Discrimination in the healthcare system contributes to worse health outcomes among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) patients.
Objective:
We examined disparities in patient experience among LGBTQ persons using social media data.
Methods:
We collected patient experience data from Twitter from February-2013 to February-2017 in the United States. We compared sentiment of patient experience tweets between Twitter users who self-identified as LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ. The effect of state-level of the partisan identity on patient experience sentiment and the differences between LGBTQ users and non-LGBTQ users were analyzed.
Results:
We observed lower patient experience sentiment among 13,689 LGBTQ users compared to 1,362,395 non-LGBTQ users. Increasing state-level liberal-political identification was associated with higher patient experience sentiment among all users, but had stronger effects among LGBTQ users.
Conclusions:
Our findings highlight that social media data can yield insights about patient experience among LGBTQ persons, and suggest state-level socio-political environment influences patient experience for this group. Efforts are needed to reduce disparities in patient care for LGBTQ persons while taking into context the effect of political climate on these inequalities.
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Copyright
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