Profiling Patients Care Satisfaction in Outpatient Settings via Comparative Twitter Analysis

Nowadays, the comparison of healthcare systems is a highly discussed topic by both scholars and practitioners, because of the intervention of Big Data in the current economies. This intervention describes a research activity concerning the profiling of the patients’ care satisfaction concerning exclusively the outpatient setting. So far, an exploratory study was conducted on a customary theoretical and conceptual framework to understand the emerging entities and topics on a country-specific audience. However, the analysis focuses on different countries united by the same language, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and Australia. Furthermore, satisfaction in the care received by outpatient patients is profiled through a comparative analysis of geolocatedtweets. This research employs web scraping techniques to retrieve user-generated tweets in the aforementioned countries through the use of specific keywords. The data are extracted, warehoused and analyzed through a Big Data Analytics process to extract the right information useful for visualization through bar plots, word clouds, and sentiment analysis outputs. On the other hand, the impact of patient satisfaction and the behavior of each healthcare system is tested by Textual Big Data Analysis and Sentiment Analysis of approximately 1.35 million tweets and an in-depth qualitative content analysis highlighting, among others, the presence of online hate speech. Finally, results highlight how current social media are really powerful means of measuring patient involvement in these issues and a consequent comparison of dissimilar cases among the various users

Speaker Biography:

Francesco Smaldone is a young Italian researcher who is completing his Ph.D. Program in Big Data Management at the University of Salerno, with a background in Public Relations, Brand Management and Data Analysis from IULM University of Milan. He has published some papers in reputed journals concerning healthcare management, patient empowerment and the dark side of social media with particular attention to the employment of quantitative statistical techniques

Author(s): Francesco Smaldone

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