Hospitals may want to devote more attention to the power of social media, according to a recent study looking at the correlation between hospitals' Facebook ratings and how well they performed on 30-day readmission rates.
Hospitals with fewer patients readmitted to the hospital within 30 days—an outcome measure used to evaluate quality—also had higher ratings on the social media site's five-star rating scale, the report found.
“These findings add support to the small but growing body of literature suggesting that unsolicited feedback on social media and hospital ratings sites corresponds to patient satisfaction and objective measures of hospital quality,” wrote the study authors last month in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. “Healthcare organizations may find that allowing ratings on social media sites warrants increased attention.”
Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, compared 315 hospitals that performed better than the national average on 30-day all-cause, unplanned hospital readmission rates from July 2011 through June 2012, with 364 hospitals that performed worse than the national average during that time.
They examined whether the user-generated metrics on the hospitals' Facebook pages correlated with their Hospital Compare measure for readmissions from the CMS.
Hospitals performing better than the national average on 30-day readmissions were more likely to use Facebook than hospitals that did not perform well, the study found. Hospitals with high rates of unplanned readmissions “may have more to lose from potential negative feedback,” the authors suspected.
The study also found that whether or not a hospital performed better or worse than the national average, those with Facebook pages, in general, had significantly lower 30-day unplanned readmission rates compared to those without a page. A one-star increase on the Facebook rating system was associated with increased odds of the hospital having fewer readmissions by a factor of five.
The researchers point out several limitations, such as confirmation bias, as users may be inclined to provide higher ratings for facilities already perceived to be of higher quality. Also, Facebook ratings may continue to reflect historical trends even if a hospital has improved or worsened after a critical mass period.
Still, they say, aggregate measures of patient satisfaction on social media may correlate with more traditionally accepted measures of hospital quality. Ratings on social media also may be more convenient for consumers compared with online tools that provide hospital ratings and rankings, the authors said.
“Social media is likely among the easiest to use and most readily accessible,” they wrote. “Continuing to develop quality measures that are understandable and accessible to patients is important in order to ensure that measures on social media do not become overvalued, given inherent biases related to online ratings."