“Told”: the Word Most Correlated to Negative Online Hospital Reviews

Abstract

Online review platforms have the ability to amplify an individual’s voice. The emergence of these platforms provides an open and public forum for patients to express their opinions which may help redefine how health systems approach the patient experience. With over 140 million reviews, Yelp! (www.yelp. com), the online review platform, continues to grow in scale and popularity. Patients have begun to share their opinions and ratings with over 8.4 million healthcare related reviews. 2 Though online reviews of individual providers may be low yield, these reviews may expose blind spots not traditionally considered by hospitals. It is the observability and scale of these online reviews that provides an opportunity for both innovation and promise. Our objective was to analyze hospital reviews posted on Yelp through the application of machine learning and natural language processing. We hypothesized there would be common language correlated with negative and positive reviews.