How patients talk about care? identifying patient experience expressions from online discussions

Abstract

Patient experience is an emerging concept that supports the improvement of healthcare services through identified patient expectations and experiences. In addition to structured feedback through official channels, experiences about healthcare appear increasingly in digital services and social media. We explore a new patient experience harvesting process based on linguistic patterns to identify relevant expressions in online discussions about children's health. Our results from the analysis of 98 229 unique sentences suggests that the 7-step process can be useful in discovering patients' evaluations of their care experiences. We propose ways to extend the process to other care contexts by adjusting the semantic reference models.