Online Reviews as Health Data: Examining the Association Between Availability of Health Care Services and Patient Star Ratings Exemplified by the Yelp Academic Dataset.

ABSTRACT:

Background

There have been public health interventions that aim to reduce barriers to health care access by extending opening hours of health care facilities. However, the impact of opening hours from the patient's perspective is not well understood.

Objective

This study aims to investigate the relationship between temporal accessibility of health care services and how patients rate the providers on Yelp, an online review website that is popular in the United States. Using crowdsourced open Internet data, such as Yelp, can help circumvent the traditional survey method.

Methods

From Yelp's limited academic dataset, this study examined the pattern of visits to health care providers and performed a secondary analysis to examine the association between patient rating (mea

SUBMITTER: Tran NN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5529738 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature