Leveraging Free-Form Comments to Assess and Improve Patient Satisfaction

In service-based organizations, client feedback is critical for continuous improvement of services. Healthcare is no exception--patient feedback provides insight in how to improve healthcare systems to create an even more patient-centered, accessible, and equitable experience. Many healthcare organizations collect patient feedback. However, the Review Comment Analysis Tool and its practical application in the primary care setting showed to be very promising in analyzing and summarizing patient feedback.
The Review Comment Analysis Tool addresses many barriers that often prevent healthcare professionals from being able to utilize and act upon quantitative feedback (e.g., Likert-type scale mean scores) they are provided with. One of the most tedious parts of a primary care physician’s job is the large Electronic Health Record (EHR) documentation workload. EHR documentation takes hours of time in addition to time spent seeing patients, so sifting through individual patient comments manually is virtually impossible. This new tool is extremely time-efficient and cuts the time spent down to a small fraction, leaving physicians with more time to spend with patients. As the Review Comment Analysis Tool requires only Excel knowledge, it is accessible and does not require one to have a background in data analytics. The Review Comment Analysis Tool provides even more of a benefit beyond efficiency—it eliminates any potential bias that could have been introduced during the manual comment screening process. Finally, the specificity of the themes under which the comments are organized allows physicians to have actionable and tangible feedback in a timely manner.
Although the Review Comment Analysis Tool is thoughtful, reduces bias, and is easily accessible, we are curious as to whether your team plans on continuing to fine-tune this instrument? For instance, do you plan to expand your analyses to include questions directed toward a variety of clinical staff? Many different healthcare team members would benefit from this type of comprehensive feedback. Collecting analyzing these data will help streamline where an organization needs to put in the most time and energy to improve patient care. Healthcare providers are extremely busy and may not have the time to utilize this platform on an individual basis. Therefore, given that the Review Comment Analysis Tool can run remotely, we wondered if you considered employing college students to conduct analysis for and/or alongside you? We think that college students, with an interest in the medical field, would be a great fit for this task. Thank you for sharing development of the Review Comment Analysis Tool.