How Are Patients Reviewing Spine Surgeons Online? A Sentiment Analysis of Physician Review Website Written Comments

Abstract

Study Design A Sentiment Analysis of online reviews of spine surgeons. Objectives Physician review websites have significant impact on a patient’s provider selection. Written reviews are subjective, but sentiment analysis through machine learning can quantitatively analyze these reviews. This study analyzes online written reviews of spine surgeons and reports biases associated with demographic factors and trends in words utilized. Methods Online written and star-reviews of spine surgeons were obtained from healthgrades.com . A sentiment analysis package was used to analyze the written reviews. The relationship of demographic variables to these scores was analyzed with t-tests and word and bigram frequency analyses were performed. Additionally, a multiple regression analysis was performed on key terms. Results 8357 reviews of 480 surgeons were analyzed. There was a significant difference between the means of sentiment analysis scores and star scores for both gender and age. Younger, male surgeons were rated more highly on average ( P < .01). Word frequency analysis indicated that behavioral factors and pain were the main contributing factors to both the best and worst reviewed surgeons. Additionally, several clinically relevant words, when included in a review, affected the odds of a positive review. Conclusions The best reviews laud surgeons for their ability to manage pain and for exhibiting positive bedside manner. However, the worst reviews primarily focus on pain and its management, as exhibited by the frequency and multivariate analysis. Pain is a clear contributing factor to reviews, thus emphasizing the importance of establishing proper pain expectations prior to any intervention.

Physician Review Websites: Understanding Patient Satisfaction with Ophthalmologists Using Natural Language Processing

“…Age analysis determined that younger ophthalmologists received higher star ratings and sentiment analysis scores than older ophthalmologists, a fnding that was in accordance with those of Smith et al [11]. Tis trend does not appear to be unique to the feld of ophthalmology, as Tang et al found similar results among reviews of hand and spine surgeons [14,15]. However, the geographic location of practice did not yield any statistically signifcant diferences with respect to star ratings or sentiment analysis scores.…”

“…Te R-squared value of this model was also used to optimize the minimum number of reviews required per physician to be included in this study. Tis method in determining the exclusion criteria was also used in the studies by Tang et al [14][15][16]. Te Student's t-tests were used to evaluate relationships between gender and both sentiment analysis scores and star ratings.…”

“…Finally, the scores are normalized to a compound score that ranges from a negative one to a positive one. We selected VADER given its past uses in online patient review analysis as well as its sensitivity to the language and format of social media platforms [14][15][16].…”

Twitter Perspectives on Cochlear Implantation: Sentiment and Thematic Analysis

“…Similarly Crocamo et al found that the average VADER sentiment scores of tweets about COVID‐19 was negative, and ranged from −0.05 to −0.16 in early 2020 21 . Lastly, Tang et al found that the average sentiment score for reviews of male and female spine surgeons was 0.44 and 0.35, respectively 22 …”

“…21 Lastly, Tang et al found that the average sentiment score for reviews of male and female spine surgeons was 0.44 and 0.35, respectively. 22 Patient experience with CI's constituted significant proportions of both the "liked" (15.0%) and "negative" cohorts (9.4%). Patients described frustration with coordinating healthcare, pain associated with the implants, postsurgical facial nerve apraxia, malfunctioning of the implants, and difficulty coping with hearing loss/quality.…”