How satisfied are patients with nursing care and why? A comprehensive study based on social media and opinion mining.

To assess the overall experience of a patient in a hospital, many factors must be analyzed; nonetheless, one of the key aspects is the performance of nurses as they closely interact with patients on many occasions. Nurses carry out many tasks that could be assessed to understand the patient's satisfaction and consequently, the effectiveness of the offered services. To assess their performance, traditionally, expensive, and time-consuming methods such as questionnaires and interviews have been used; nevertheless, the development of social networks has allowed the patients to convey their opinions in a free and public manner. For that reason, in this study, a comprehensive analysis has been performed based on patients' opinions collected from a feedback platform for health and care services, to discover the topics about nurses the patients are more interested in. To do so, a topic modeling technique has been proposed. After this, sentiment analysis has been applied to classify the topics as satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Finally, the results have been compared with what the patients think about doctors. The results highlight what topics are most relevant to assess the patient satisfaction and to what extent. The results remark that the opinion about nurses is, in general, more positive than about doctors.

Understanding what patients think about hospitals: A deep learning approach for detecting emotions in patient opinions.

INTRODUCTION: Most hospital assessment systems are based on the study of objective statistical variables as well as patient opinions on their experiences with respect to the services offered by each hospital. Nevertheless, studies have indicated that most of these assessment systems fail to detect patient emotions when they are assessing their stays in a hospital. This information is vital to understanding most of the patient reviews, which are very complex and convey several emotions per review. Therefore, this study aimed to address the problem of detecting multiple emotions from patient reviews. METHODS: First, a large set of patient opinions was collected from a website that allowed patients to publish their experiences when visiting hospitals. Second, each opinion was labeled with the corresponding conveyed emotions. Third, a deep learning architecture based on a bidirectional gated recurrent unit with a multichannel convolutional neural network layer was proposed to detect multiple emotions from these reviews. Finally, the hyperparameters of this architecture were fine-tuned and different pretrained word embedding models were configured to test its performance. RESULTS: The results confirmed that our proposed method outperformed other deep learning and machine learning-based algorithms and achieved an average accuracy of 95.82%. Furthermore, the experiments show that clinical-domain word embedding slightly outperforms other general-domain word embeddings, although general-domain embeddings are larger in terms of dimensions. CONCLUSIONS: The combination of the gated recurrent unit and the multichannel convolutional neural network is able to exploit both semantic and syntactic characteristics of patient opinions. The findings of this study identify research gaps related to areas such as opinion-based hospital recommendations, thereby providing future research directions.

A relevance and quality-based ranking algorithm applied to evidence-based medicine.

BACKGROUND: The amount of information available about millions of different subjects is growing every day. This has led to the birth of new search tools specialized in different domains, because classical information retrieval models have trouble dealing with the special characteristics of some of these domains. Evidence-based Medicine is a case of a complex domain where classical information retrieval models can help search engines retrieve documents by considering the presence or absence of terms, but these must be complemented with other specific strategies which allow retrieving and ranking documents including the best current evidence and methodological quality. OBJECTIVE: The goal is to present a ranking algorithm able to select the best documents for clinicians considering aspects related to the relevance and the quality of said documents. METHODS: In order to assess the effectiveness of this proposal, an experimental methodology has been followed by using Medline as a data set and the Cochrane Library as a gold standard. RESULTS: Applying the evaluation methodology proposed, and after submitting 40 queries on the platform developed, the MAP (Mean Average Precision) obtained was 20.26%. CONCLUSIONS: Successful results have been achieved with the experiments, improving on other studies, but under different and even more complex circumstances.