Social ranking of medical institutions based on social information

In this paper we propose a method with which to rank medical institutions by utilizing the social information provided by social network services (SNS). Furthermore, the gap between the rankings proposed in this paper and the rankings based on the existing method provided by USNews.com is analyzed, and a need for social marketing by medical institutions is proposed. USNews.com ranks medical institutions each year and publishes the data through its site. Here, the rankings are determined based on the information generated offline, based on the ranking criteria determined by a specific group, in order to provide the applicable information. Consequently, the rankings perceived by the patients who actually visit the medical institutions may be somewhat different from the rankings provided by USNews.com. For this paper the social information related to medical institutions was crawled from the SNS sites in order to rank the medical institutions based on the information generated by many users in the social media, and these rankings were compared to the ranking results provided by USNews.com. The data used for the experiment comprised the basic information on the 892 medical institutions crawled from USNews.com and the social information crawled from the SNS sites. Social information was available for only 443 institutions. The rankings were computed for these institutions based on the method proposed in this paper, so as to compare to the existing results. According to the ranking results for 316 institutions, the rankings improved from one place to 846 places, with the average improvement being 330 places.