A method for retrieval of tweets about hospital patient experience

Abstract

Analysis of Twitter communications can capture data on hospital patient experience, and this will be more appropriate for hospital management and patient care because the data represent patients’ and carers’ experience about something as they happen. This paper reports on the development and testing of a semi-automatic method for retrieval of subsets of Twitter communications representing hospital patient experience on different topics and subtopics. Twelve main topics of discussions on patient experience have been identified. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that it is possible to retrieve tweets on most of the topics by using pre-defined search strings comprising various terms that represent a given topic.