NEWS RELEASE
Artificial intelligence is being used to understand patients’ emotions to detect breaches in COVID-19 across 43 hospitals in Australia, the deployment of Emotion AI technology in a world-first.
As hospitals wrestle with the challenge posed by COVID-19, Healthscope a leading private healthcare provider, with 43 private hospitals and pathology operations across Australia and New Zealand treating 600,000 patients annually, has turned to Emotion AI platform Adoreboard to more deeply understand patient emotions.
Patient feedback which is captured in real-time through Qualtrics, an experience management platform, is integrated automatically into Adoreboard’s Emotics platform which can detect 24 levels of emotional intensity. Its algorithms can detect recurring themes that trigger emotions such as Joy or Anger which in turn helps Healthscope prioritise what actions to take.
During COVID-19, comments submitted by patients helped steer action taken on the ground in response. Analysis by Healthscope using Adoreboard shows that apprehension across all hospitals spiked by 33% during the lockdown period as patients came to terms with the pandemic.
It showed that 12.5% of all COVID-19 related comments expressed concerns around social distancing in areas such as patient lifts as well as the need for multi-language signage with this issue alone increasing sadness by 30%.
Within days the patient experience team at Healthscope rolled out innovative signage on social distancing instructions on thousands of meal trays across all hospitals with social distancing messaging for patients in multiple languages.
Jeffrey Woods, National Patient Experience Manager at Healthscope said:
“We are in the business of human caring and humans are emotional beings, this means we can all relate to emotions. Adoreboard’s Emotics helps our frontline staff connect the dots in far more meaningful and empathetic ways. This improves speed to insight and ultimately the patient outcome by enabling us to prioritise decisions based on emotional intensity in any feedback.”
The technology has also been deployed to detect other issues impacting patient experience by providing predictions on the outcome on its patient experience metrics if resolved.
One such issue was the impact of blood monitoring cuffs which if fitted wrongly can cause discomfort to a patient’s arm. The AI identified this issue reduced patient trust by 33% and increased sadness by 88%. The analysis showed by fixing this issue gains in satisfaction levels of patient experience would increase by 18%.
Jeffrey Woods added: “When you think about the feedback regarding blood pressure cuffs. Initially, when reviewing the data we assumed it was related to the clinical management of blood pressure and the possible need for the development of enhanced clinical guidelines. By digging a little deeper using Adoreboard we uncovered that the real golden nugget was not blood pressure management a clinical issue but rather it was the discomfort experienced from incorrectly sized or placed cuffs, along with the frequency of inflation/deflation. This is a very different and human issue which required a completely different intervention.”
The technology has been used to measure the impact of the pre-surgery for patients with simple changes to waiting room experience would result in a 16% increase in NPS.
Adoreboard, a Gartner Cool Vendor in Customer Analytics using Artificial Intelligence, is available on the Qualtrics XM Marketplace for all Qualtrics customers who want to create Decision Ready Insights from their experience data.
Chris Johnston CEO of Adoreboard said: “Our software platform Emotics is making it easier and faster for Healthscope to prioritise decisions by automatically pinpointing the drivers of emotional intensity. This creates tangible business outcomes by improving Healthscope’s human experience.”
