International emergency nursing using online reviews to assess important healthcare components in Ohio emergency care facilities.

The objective of this project was to collect publicly available online reviews of urgent care facilities and emergency departments in Ohio to identify important components of the patient experience.Webscraping, a method of collecting internet data, was conducted on all Google and Yelp reviews for emergency departments and urgent care facilities in Ohio. Extracted data included: facility location, date, review text, and star rating. Content analysis was conducted on data along with inferential statistics, then leveraged to identify trends. The Model of Models platform was used to guide topic analysis of online reviews and assess how the content aligned with categories and sentiments that influence the patient experience in the emergency department.A total of 33,316 reviews were collected between January 2008 and June 2021. During this time, 29,023 reviews posted were based on visits to urgent care facilities and 4,293 were from emergency departments. Most comments were related to "Personal" and "Technological" issues. There were delineations in the data noting distinctions between staff and physicians. Where staff issues frequently were associated with behaviors and attitudes such as "friendliness", comments referring to physicians were more commonly mentioned when describing healthcare access or process issues.Online ratings of the healthcare facilities reflect the patient's satisfaction and how well expectations are being met. Through careful analysis of online ratings, we can better understand the commonalities and disparities in the patient experience. Used in conjunction with standardized satisfaction surveys currently in use by hospitals, online reviews of healthcare facilities contribute to a more robust picture of care quality and describe the patient experience beyond the capacity of satisfaction surveys. However, hospitals without access to standardized surveys would benefit from freely analyzing patient feedback from online reviews.

Duke Scholars

Author Khaled Bader School of Nursing