Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 10, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 10, 2020 - Apr 7, 2020
Date Accepted: May 14, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Assessing Patient Experience and Healthcare Quality of Dental Care Using Patient Online Reviews in the United States: Informatics Methods
ABSTRACT
Background:
Over the last two decades, patient review websites (PRWs) have emerged as an important online platform for doctors’ ratings and reviews. Recent studies suggested the significance of PRWs as a data source 1) for patients to choose doctors, 2) for healthcare providers to learn and improve from patients’ feedbacks, and 3) to foster a culture of trust and transparency between patients and healthcare providers. However, as compared to other medical specialties, studies of patient online reviews (PORs) that focus on dentists in the United States remain absent.
Objective:
The present study sought to understand to what extent PORs can provide performance feedbacks that reflect dental care quality and patient experience.
Methods:
Using mixed informatics methods incorporating statistics, natural language processing, and domain expert evaluation, we analyzed PORs of 204,751 dentists extracted from HealthGrades with two specific aims. First, we examined the associations between POR ratings and a variety of characteristics of dentists. Second, we identified topics from patients’ reviews that can be mapped to the national assessment of dental patient experience measured by the Patient Experience Measures from the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Dental Plan Survey.
Results:
We found that higher ratings were associated with female dentists (t71881 = 2.45, p < .01, g = 0.01), dentists at a younger age (F7, 107128 = 246.97, p < 0.001, g = 0.11), and those whose patients experienced a short wait time (F4, 150055 = 10417.77, p < 0.001, g = 0.18). We also identified a number of topics from patient reviews that corresponded to the measures from CAHPS, including “discomfort” (e.g., “painful/painless root canal or deep cleaning”), “ethics” (e.g., “high pressure sales” and “unnecessary dental work”).
Conclusions:
These findings suggest that PORs could be used as an important data source for understanding patient experience and healthcare quality of dental care.
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