Driving continuous improvement in the quality of public services for better citizen experience has continued to gain momentum. In the healthcare sector, patient experience surveys have become an important channel for engaging patients in identifying the shortcomings in healthcare services and co-creating solutions to some of the identified challenges. In Ireland, the In-Patient survey series was launched in 2017 as part of the National Care Experience Programme to improve acute care services in Irish public hospitals. While the quantitative data collected from these surveys have been exploited to identify priority areas for improvements, attempts to harness the complementary free-text feedback have produced very limited actionable insights for stakeholders. In this talk, I will present our framing of this challenge and how we addressed it in our study. Specifically, our study sought to determine the contextual factors associated with both positive and negative care experience as well as suggestions offered by patients from the over 40,000 free-text comments collected during the 2017 and 2018 surveys. Underpinned by a linguistic framework, our approach integrates text analytics, traditional qualitative analysis, and deep learning techniques to identify from the free text corpus the key contextual factors associated with patient experience and suggestions made by patients. The key findings, challenges faced, lessons learnt, how our results are being used by policymakers and practitioners, and future work will also be discussed.
Dr. Adegboyega Ojo is Associate Professor of Management and Government Information Systems at Maynooth University School of Business. He is particularly interested in data and digital technology-driven innovation in the public sector. He is an editorial board member of Government Information Quarterly journal and Digital Government: Research and Practice journal. He is also Associate Editor (Africa) for the Information Polity Journal.
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