Proactive Approach to Patient Centric Transformation Using Sentiment Analysis to Monitor Healthcare Targets

The healthcare system in the UK both in primary and social care has experienced unprecedented challenges dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and “stress tested” like many other healthcare systems worldwide. This has resulted in backlog of patient referrals and treatments, ageing population, staff morale and patient dissatisfaction with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is at a record low, with waiting times for emergency care being one of the biggest challenges. At some of the worst performing NHS trusts, patients are waiting over 12 hours for care despite the target for patients to receive care in under 4 hours. The current UK government is trying to improve the performance of NHS trusts by implementing targets and suggesting dismissal of management at underperforming trusts which are unable to improve. The use of digital innovation and initiatives offers the opportunities to assist in making transformative changes to the healthcare systems by improving efficiency and allowing “Smarter working” using a myriad of digital solutions. The paper outlines an opportunity for NHS trusts to undertake sentiment analysis of social media posts allowing qualitative data to be quantified using social media analytics software tools, allowing patient feedback to be analysed to identify hotspots for improvements or determine if healthcare providers are meeting their targets. Examples provided of how this could be performed using social media analytics software to triangulate with patient feedback and staff perceptions and a series of recommendations are discussed on how healthcare could undertake this as part of a provision of digital transformation initiatives to move to patient centric care.