Understanding Public Healthcare Service Quality from Social Media

Despite the opportunities and demands to use social media to support public policy-making processes, a systematic approach to reflect social media sentiments in policy making processes is yet to be proposed in the literature. This paper provides a method to assign tweets into one of SERVQUAL dimensions to identify sentiments and to track perceived service quality for policy makers in national health services (NHS). In this study, we devise a methodology to (1) identify more reliable topic sets through repeated LDA and clustering and (2) classify tweets with the topics based on a theory in service quality. To demonstrate the applicability, we selected healthcare as our target area and picked the NHS of U.K. for sensing the service quality of public policy. We collected tweets about NHS for about 4 years and created dictionaries related to the domain of healthcare with user reviews on hospitals and general practitioners in U.K. We applied the suggested methodology to track social perceptions and compared the applicability among different methods.