Journal of Medical Internet Research (Jul 2020)

Assessing Patient Experience and Healthcare Quality of Dental Care Using Patient Online Reviews in the United States: Mixed Methods Study

  • Lin, Ye,
  • Hong, Y Alicia,
  • Henson, Bradley S,
  • Stevenson, Robert D,
  • Hong, Simon,
  • Lyu, Tianchu,
  • Liang, Chen

DOI
https://doi.org/10.2196/18652
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 22, no. 7
p. e18652

Abstract

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BackgroundOver the last two decades, patient review websites have emerged as an essential online platform for doctor ratings and reviews. Recent studies suggested the significance of such websites as a data source for patients to choose doctors for healthcare providers to learn and improve from patient feedback and to foster a culture of trust and transparency between patients and healthcare providers. However, as compared to other medical specialties, studies of online patient reviews that focus on dentists in the United States remain absent. ObjectiveThis study sought to understand to what extent online patient reviews can provide performance feedbacks that reflect dental care quality and patient experience. MethodsUsing mixed informatics methods incorporating statistics, natural language processing, and domain expert evaluation, we analyzed the online patient reviews of 204,751 dentists extracted from HealthGrades with two specific aims. First, we examined the associations between patient ratings and a variety of dentist characteristics. Second, we identified topics from patient reviews that can be mapped to the national assessment of dental patient experience measured by the Patient Experience Measures from the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Dental Plan Survey. ResultsHigher ratings were associated with female dentists (t71881=2.45, P<.01, g=0.01), dentists at a younger age (F7, 107128=246.97, P<.001, g=0.11), and those whose patients experienced a short wait time (F4, 150055=10417.77, P<0.001, g=0.18). We also identified several topics that corresponded to CAHPS measures, including discomfort (eg, painful/painless root canal or deep cleaning), and ethics (eg, high-pressure sales, and unnecessary dental work). ConclusionsThese findings suggest that online patient reviews could be used as a data source for understanding the patient experience and healthcare quality in dentistry.