How Sentiment Analysis Helps Improve the Patient Experience

In today’s competitive healthcare industry, hospitals, physician practices, and health systems are becoming more focused on improving the patient experience. Healthcare facilities offering convenience, functionality, and access that modern consumers expect are emerging leaders in their spaces and improving their bottom-line.

Today’s consumers have a ton of options when it comes to choosing healthcare services. Therefore, healthcare facilities need to be proactive in attracting and retaining patients. One of the ways they can do this is by using patient sentiment analysis.

What Is Patient Sentiment Analysis?

Patient sentiment analysis is a process of analyzing patient feedback about your practice based on the patient’s emotions at the time. The analysis helps to uncover the emotions, opinions, and attitudes of patients based on what they say about your practice.

Patient sentiment analysis can help healthcare providers gain a competitive edge over the competition and improve their services based on the feedback provided.

You can use a software application like RepuGen to analyze comments or texts by patients about their experience in your facility. The software analyzes patients’ comments about your facility on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms to extract the true picture of patient experience in your center.

Importance of Patient Sentiment Analysis for Healthcare Organizations

Patient sentiment analysis enables healthcare providers to understand what patients feel about them, identify gaps in their patient experience, and implement timely corrective measures.

The benefits of patient sentiment analysis include:

i) Gathering in-depth insight on the patient experience

Sentiment analysis can help healthcare providers identify the areas where they excel or fail in patient satisfaction. Management can analyze the data collected to find out the most common complaints or compliments, segment the information based on doctors or departments, and other parameters to identify opportunities for patient care improvement.

ii) Quantifying departmental and employee performance

Patient sentiment analysis can quantify the emotions and feelings of your patients to paint a clear picture of your facility’s performance. The analysis can classify patient comments into specific categories such as processes, places, and people, and then assign them various scores to uncover what patients feel about various aspects of your facility.

For example, the Word Cloud Analysis feature of RepuGen checks the frequency of words used by patients and picks up the most used words from the comments left by patients. Here are some examples of comments patients may leave about their experience:

• We waited for hours. (Negative)
• Excellent service but still need to improve on waiting hours. (Neutral)
• Helpful and caring staff. I was seen in less than half an hour! (Positive)

The comments can be collated based on their intensity and to determine the areas where a healthcare practice is performing excellently, has room for improvement, or is failing.

Benefits of Sentiment Analysis for Healthcare Businesses

Sentiment analysis provides insight into the performance of a healthcare facility. The collated analysis of comments can provide a clear indication of what patients need from your practice, how your employees are rated, and other concerns that may not be obvious to the management.

How RepuGen Uses Machine Learning for Sentiment Analysis

RepuGen can help you understand what patients are thinking and feeling when they leave your practice. The software gathers patient feedback across multiple locations and providers and uses machine learning to analyze and extrapolate the data into intuitive reports and charts for each location and provider.

From the reports generated, you can see trends for sentiments and their intensity. This will give you a clear picture of the areas where you need to improve patient care or service delivery.

Using Sentiment Analysis to Improve Healthcare

Physicians, health care facilities, and health centers can use sentiment analysis to improve clinical quality. The data gathered by a sentiment analysis software can help to understand what aspects patients need to have a positive experience at healthcare facilities.

Sentiment analysis allows everyone in the health sector with an opportunity to understand the ideal patient experience that creates better health care and increases revenues.