Felix Greaves*, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom Utz J Pape, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom Dominic King, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom Ara Darzi, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom Azeem Majeed, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom Robert M Wachter, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States Christopher Millett, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom Track: Research Presentation Topic: Web 2.0 approaches for clinical practice, clinical research, quality monitoring Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School Room: A-Pechet Room Date: 2012-09-16 09:45 AM – 10:30 AM Last modified: 2012-09-12

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Objective: Unsolicited web-based comments by patients regarding their healthcare are increasing, but controversial. The relationship between such online patient reports and conventional measures of patient experience (obtained via survey) is not known. We examined hospital level associations between web-based patient ratings on the NHS Choices website, introduced in England during 2008, and paper-based survey measures of patient experience. We also aimed to compare these two methods of measuring patient experience.

Design: We performed a cross-sectional observational study of all (n=146) acute general NHS hospital trusts in England, using data from 9,997 patient web-based ratings posted on the NHS Choices website during 2009/10. Hospital trust level indicators of patient experience from a paper-based survey (five measures) were compared with web-based patient ratings using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. We compared the strength of associations between clinical outcomes, patient experience survey results and NHS Choices ratings using Fischer’s z-transformation.

Results: Web-based ratings of patient experience were associated with ratings derived from a national paper-based patient survey (Spearman rho = 0.31-0.49, p< 0.001 for all). Associations with clinical outcomes were at least as strong for online ratings as for traditional survey measures of patient experience.

Conclusions: Unsolicited web-based patient ratings of their care, though potentially prone to many biases, are correlated with survey measures of patient experience. They may be useful tools for patients when choosing healthcare providers and for clinicians to improve the quality of their services.