AI enables patient emotions to be analysed improving hospital experience

24 August 2023

A new way to capture patients’ emotions is being pioneered by Healthscope to improve how they deliver patient experience following a 3-year study, in what is believed to be a world first by a private hospital.

Hospitals rely every day on data such as numbers on heart or blood pressure monitors to understand the vitals of patients.

Anita Hodge National Manager Reported Experience and Outcomes for Healthscope says going beyond numbers to “understand patient emotions and each individual story” now plays a key role to better understanding how to improve patient experience.

Patient experience includes everything from admissions processes, to the food patients eat, to the bedside manner of doctors to patients being discharged. By improving these factors evidence from clinical studies have shown this leads to better patient outcomes.

Healthscope has partnered with Adoreboard, a tech spin out from Queen’s University in the UK, since 2019 to quantify the drivers of human emotion like trust and anger in patient feedback using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

To date over 370,000 surveys from patients have been collected in real-time with almost 50% of all surveys containing a feedback comment.

To eliminate the significant task of manually reading each patient comment, Adoreboard’s technology automatically analyses the text and links the emotional intensity of what is being communicated to a theme such as the food and meal experience. The AI platform then makes a prediction if Healthscope resolves such issues of the likely improvement in patients’ perception of the quality of treatment and care.

Results from a 3-year deployment shows that individual hospitals could see as much as a 13.9% improvement in operational metrics that measure patient perception of care received. The technology is now being used across all 38 Healthscope hospitals in Australia to target the maximum benefit from a range of interventions designed to improve patient experience.

Anita Hodge National Manager Reported Experience and Outcomes, Healthscope who presented the results of the innovation at the largest gathering of customer experience professionals known as ‘The Customer Show’ at Sydney’s ICC last week says that insights from deploying predictive insights provide lessons in best practice for other industries including healthcare providers. 

“Before deploying the predictive insights platform, we had a significant challenge of manually reviewing patient comments. Not only has this been removed, but we can also now link emotions like joy, trust and anger to themes that matter most to patients. In this way we can prioritise what we action and the likely impact of this improvement on the patient experience. Understanding the best action to improve patient experience has been most impactful.”

Adoreboard which is a Gartner Cool Vendor in Customer Analytics using Artificial Intelligence is used by some of the world’s most well-known brands including Procter and Gamble, Allstate and Amazon.

Damien Lloyd, National Director Clinical Governance at Healthscope added that understanding emotion is critical for the patient relationship and application of Adoreboard has taken this to a new level of insight.

“To enable patient centred care, it’s important we capture crucial moments for enhanced experiences. The results on improving operational indicators from deploying Adoreboard have been both impressive and impactful to the business and frontline clinical staff.”