Cloud Based Surveys to Assess Patient Perceptions of Health Care: 1000 Respondents in 3 days for US $300

BACKGROUND: There are many challenges in conducting surveys of study participants, including cost, time, and ability to obtain quality and reproducible work. Cloudsourcing (an arrangement where a cloud provider is paid to carry out services that could be provided in-house) has the potential to provide vastly larger, less expensive, and more generalizable survey pools. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to evaluate, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a cloud-based workforce to assess patients’ perspectives of health care. METHODS: A national online survey posted to Amazon's MTurk consisted of 33 multiple choice and open-ended questions. Continuous attributes were compared using t tests. RESULTS: We obtained 1084 responses for a total cost of US $298.10 in less than 3 days with 300 responses in under 6 hours. Of those, 44.74% (485/1084) were male and 54.80% (594/1084) female, representing 49 out of 50 states and aged 18 to 69 years. CONCLUSIONS: Amazon’s MTurk is a potentially useful survey method for attaining information regarding public opinions and/or knowledge with the distinct advantage of cost, speed, and a wide and relatively good representation of the general population, in a confidential setting for respondents.