The partnership between Healthscope and tech company Adoreboard represents a first for private hospitals.
Private healthcare operator Healthscope – which operates 38 hospitals across Australia – has partnered with tech company Adoreboard to garner information on patient emotions using AI.
The technology works by analysing patient surveys, linking the emotional intensity expressed in text to emotions and emotion levels. These findings would allow hospital executives to better understand and prioritise patient emotions and outcomes.
Results of a three-year study illustrated that the platform could lead to an increase of how patients rate their care and treatment of 13.9%.
Anita Hodge, Healthscope’s national manager for reported experience and outcomes, said that data gathered by medical devices only reveals part of the story. Ms Hodge told The Australian that going “beyond the numbers to understand patient emotions and each individual story” played an important role in better understanding patients’ experiences.
“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 to anger to themes that matter most to patients,” Ms Hodge was quoted as saying.
“In this way, we can prioritise what we action and the likely impact of this improvement on the patient experience. Understanding the next best action to improve patient experience has been most impactful.”
Ms Hodge explained that patient experience encapsulated factors like the admissions processes, to the food patients eat, to the bedside manner of clinicians, to patients being discharged.
Healthscope’s national director of clinical governance, Damien Lloyd, said understanding emotion was critical for the patient relationship and the application of Adoreboard had 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,” he said.
The technology has analysed more than 400,000 surveys across Australia.
Adoreboard is currently used by conglomerates such as Amazon, Procter & Gamble and Allstate, and the collaboration with Healthscope is a first for a private health company.
Meanwhile, Sonic Healthcare continues to invest in AI, backing AI start-up Harrison.ai’s $129m Series B funding round in 2021. Sonic chief executive Colin Goldschmidt branded it a “big step forward” in delivering modern medicine and making diagnosis for a range of conditions more efficient.
The role of AI has been recognised in sleep apnoea treatment, with ResMed currently testing its own platform. CEO Mike Farrell envisioned the technology would remove the need for nurses to perform menial tasks in monitoring sleep health.
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