TITLE:
Twitter Sentiment at the Hospital and Patient Level as a Measure of Pediatric Patient Experience
AUTHORS:
Samantha Robinson, Ellie Vicha
KEYWORDS:
Twitter, Health Data Acquisition, Patient Experience, Self-Report Measures, Cancer
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Pediatrics,
Vol.11 No.4,
December
8,
2021
ABSTRACT: Although pediatric cancer
survival rates have improved, cancer is still the leading cause of death by
disease among children in the United States. With nearly 16,000 new diagnoses
each year of children having an average age of six years old, there is still
much to be done to improve survival rates among children diagnosed with cancer.
Additionally, clinical outcomes can be greatly improved by first understanding
the patient perspective and, consequently, there is a need to understand the
pediatric cancer patient experience. Interest in the analysis of
patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures, including those specific to patient
experience, has grown in recent years as attempts are made to understand and
assess latent (i.e., unobserved) traits
such as quality of life. While most traditional PRO measures involve lengthy
and costly surveys that are limited in scope, posts on social media platforms
are frequently lauded as more authentic, unbiased measures of patient
experience. While many previous studies have utilized Twitter as a source for
patient experience data that is not easily captured by traditional PROs, very
few studies have examined the use of Twitter data to explore and better
understand the experience of pediatric cancer patients specifically.
Lexicon-based sentiment analysis of Twitter data was used both to examine the
pediatric cancer patient experience as well as to compare the attitudes,
perceptions, and overall impressions of individuals with St. Jude experiences
to those with more general experiences. Results indicated that patients
reflected on their care with more relative negativity when speaking of
experiences other than St. Jude. While there were some notable differences
between the two comparison groups, the sentiment of both was still mostly
positive. Pediatric oncology differs greatly from adult oncological care and,
thus, the proposed use of sentiment analysis with patient social media posts
serving as authentic PRO data likely differentiates more between medical providers
and clinical care settings when assessing adult patient experience. Despite
limitations, this exploratory study suggests that Twitter can be utilized as a
source for authentic, real-time patient experience data that will improve
overall care and better clinical outcomes, even among the pediatric cancer
patient population.