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)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Patient Online Reviews as a Potential Data Source to Understand Patient Experience with Dentists and Dental Healthcare Quality in the United States
ABSTRACT
Background:
Over the last decades, patient review websites (PRWs) have emerged as an important web-based platform for doctors’ ratings and reviews. Recent studies suggested the significance of PRWs as an information 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. Yet, studies of patient online reviews (PORs) of 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 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), dentists at a younger age (F7, 107128 = 246.97, p < 0.001), and those whose patients experienced a short wait time (F4, 150055 = 10417.77, p < 0.001). We also identified a number of topics from patient reviews that corresponded to the measures from CAHPS.
Conclusions:
These findings suggest that PORs could be used as an important data source for understanding patient experience and improving the quality of dental care.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.