Study Finds Hospitals' Readmission Rates Correlate With Facebook Ratings

Fierce Healthcare writes: Patients’ Facebook ratings of hospitals appear to correlate with a widely used metric of care quality, a new study found.  The study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, compared how 4,800 U.S. hospitals rated on Facebook’s five-star scale with their 30-day readmission rates, as reported by Medicaid’s Hospital Compare website. After controlling for hospital size and type, researchers found that the average Facebook rating was higher for hospitals with lower than average readmission rates, while hospitals with the highest readmission rates received fewer stars from Facebook users.  Read more.