#PatientExperience: Twitter Offers Valuable Insights

James A. Gardner, Connective DX

“When you think of using social media to conduct groundbreaking customer research, a hospital probably isn’t the first place you’d look,” says James A. Gardner of Connective DX.

But, he points out, “Your patients are talking about you and their experience with your hospital! If you’re ready to listen to these conversations and learn from them, sentiment analytics could be just the tool for you.”

As an example, he cites the Computational Epidemiology Group in the Boston Children’s Hospital’s Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) as a leader in mining social channels for health-related insights. “It is now looking to sentiment analysis on Twitter to complement more traditional research methods and help hospital administrators better track patient experience metrics.

“Proponents of sentiment analysis believe it could eventually lead to better insights than traditional approaches to patient research while at the same time being both cheaper and faster,” Gardner says.

Are you curious about sentiment analysis? “Start small and for free by simply using Twitter’s search tool to find @mentions of your organization with a happy emoticon and then a sad one,” Gardner recommends. “You may be surprised at what you find.”

For more on the valuable insights Boston Children’s Hospital has gleaned from Twitter, including some of the real-life Tweets analyzed, as well as a few free sentiment analysis tools you may want to try out at your organization, read our full article now: Hidden in Plain Sight: Twitter Holds Patient Experience Clues.

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President