Website disclosure and financial performance: Evidence from U.S. hospitals using a textual analysis approach

Although a website is widely available for a hospital to communicate with its stakeholders, the impact of hospital website disclosure has been under-investigated by prior studies. By employing textual analysis techniques to analyze the website content of U.S. hospitals, we explore the relationship between hospital website disclosure and financial performance. We find that a higher degree of hospital website disclosure is associated with better financial performance. We further find that the effect of hospital website disclosure on financial performance is more pronounced when website readability is higher or sentiment is more positive. This suggests that hospitals that adopt positive tones and avoid using unintelligibly technical and medical terms for website content report better earnings.