How patients describe their pain management experiences on Yelp

What is it about?

Through online platforms like Yelp, patients and caregivers have the ability to write reviews of hospitals. In these reviews, some patients describe experiences they've had at various hospitals with their pain management experiences. We read through a representative sample of these reviews, and then used automated language processing (basically, computer language analysis), to figure out what the content of those reviews was. In our paper, we talk about the information we discovered, how we discovered it, and some of the implications of our findings!

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Why is it important?

Pain management is an increasingly important, complicated question. Principles for pain management have varied drastically over the years, and no real consensus has emerged about how to tackle them. Many professional groups are now tackling these issues, trying to identify best pain management practices for different groups of people and different conditions. Patients' experiences with their own pain, the things that helped it and didn't, provide an important resource, especially the unsolicited narratives like the ones we see on Yelp where patients have the freedom to say what is important to them outside of the bounds of traditional surveys.