Raising up the voices of the closest observers of care

Patients and family members are the closest observers of care, with their focus on one patient in one hospital bed or clinic room. While patient-centred care is a well-accepted domain of quality, our ability to gather and use the patient and family member perspective to improve care is still relatively limited.

One potential source of data for this perspective is online reviews of care from social media sources such as Yelp, the online review site, and Facebook, the popular social networking site. These online sources of consumer-generated content likely exert greater influence than the scientifically validated measures of quality published on government-sponsored public reporting websites, such as the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) and Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) measures. The influence of online sources of patient-generated assessments of care likely reflects a number of factors: Yelp and Facebook receive far greater...

http://ift.tt/2ru5k5L