The objective was to assess the possibility of using a combination of official and unofficial Facebook ratings and comments as a basis for nation-wide hospital quality assessments in Norway.
All hospitals from a national cross-sectional patient experience survey in 2015 were matched with corresponding Facebook ratings. Facebook ratings were correlated with both case-mix adjusted and unadjusted patient-reported experience scores, with separate analysis for hospitals with official site ratings and hospitals with unofficial site ratings. Facebook ratings were also correlated with patient-reported incident scores, hospital size, 30-day mortality and 30-day readmission. Facebook comments from 20 randomly selected hospitals were analysed, contrasting the content and sentiments of official versus unofficial Facebook pages.
Facebook ratings were significantly correlated with most patient-reported indicators, with the highest correlations relating to unadjusted scores for organisation (0.60, p