Detecting salient aspects in online reviews of health providers.

We present a fully automated method to capture what topics health consumers discuss when reviewing their health providers online. Our method does not rely on any manual tagging of the information, and operates on the text of online reviews. We analyze a large set of reviews and compare the topics discussed when reviewing providers with different specialties. This work provides a complementary view on the traditional qualitative approaches proposed so far to capturing factors for patient satisfaction. Furthermore, our research contributes to understanding in a bottom-up fashion the needs and interests of health consumers online.