Hospital ratings on social media may reflect true quality of care

A new study has found a correlation between how hospitals are rated on Facebook's five-star system and how well they performed on a widely-used measure of quality care. Late in 2013, Facebook began providing organizations the option of allowing users to post ratings ranging from one to five stars on their official Facebook pages. The current study was designed to compare hospitals' 30-day readmission rates with their Facebook ratings. "We found that the hospitals in which patients were less likely to have unplanned readmissions within the 30 days after discharge had higher Facebook ratings than were those with higher readmission rates," says lead author McKinley Glover, M.D., MHS, a clinical fellow in the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Department of Radiology.