Abstract
Online patient reviews can offer a rich information source to users of healthcare services, as well as for hospital management and quality monitoring. Whereas in recent years the volume of online patient reviews has been consistently growing, organizations still lack standardized approaches and tools to allow for the systematic monitoring of users’ online comments. Therefore, managers are lagging in the ability to make use of such data from patients’ voices for improving the quality of the services provided. If organizations fail to develop the right capabilities to consider users’ online reviews and feedback, they risk not only to miss important quality failure alerts, as wells as to frustrate their customers’ expectations for service and attention. In this chapter, we present a qualitative analysis of patients’ reviews for healthcare services in Portugal, building on a sample of data extracted from Google for the year of 2019. The chapter reports the major quality management themes addressed by hospital users in their online expressions and offers some guidelines to support a structured analysis and visualization of results from online users’ word of mouth data.
Highlights
The Quality of Health Services influences the dynamics of Health Institutions and determines the care provided to users, which are co-producers in a logic of interactivity
The study allowed the identification of relevant variables for segmenting the content generated by users: hospital episode, editor, service, professional and the feeling of the comment, as the results showed that the automatic classification differs significantly manual classification, demonstrating the complexity of its a posteriori classification implying that it is important not to compromise the voluntary character and the trust of the user
One of the key contributions of the study is to advance in the classification of available customer generated content in a manner that is aligned with prevalent service quality models, i.e. establishing a correspondence between customer reviews and prevalent service quality attributes
Summary
The Quality of Health Services influences the dynamics of Health Institutions and determines the care provided to users, which are co-producers in a logic of interactivity. The collection of citizens’ opinions about the Quality of Health Services, allows for a subjective report distinct from other quality measures (e.g., quality indicators) It is usually carried out in a structured, offline, and conventional way (e.g., satisfaction surveys) [1, 2], but globalization and the internet have brought a novel feedback source called analysis of online comments and classifications (OCC) [3, 4]. Electronic word of mouth and customer ratings altogether designed as OCC, offer a rich source of information for customer preservice evaluations They are an enormous source of data and insights to inform the quality management function in the company. In health services there is an information asymmetry between the user and the superior care provider compared to other services [11, 12]
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