Patient feedback solution helps trust improve services

Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is using the AI-driven PEP Health platform to analyse online patient comments and internally-collected feedback in real time.

The trust, one of NHS England’s Global Digital Exemplar Fast Followers, is renowned for its commitment to digital transformation.

And it is now working with PEP Health to create a bespoke patient experience dashboard.

This will give the trust a better understanding of how each of its services are performing from the perspective of their patient, carers, and relatives.

The dashboard, which was configured to each service and ward in just a few weeks, enables the trust to track trends and drill down to specific departments or individual comments, as well as benchmarking themselves against national averages and peers, increasing the value of patient experience measurements.

By listening to patients across the whole trust it will be able to gain deep quantitative and qualitative insights into how patients experience their care

The dashboard combines comments made by patients, online in the public domain, with SMS feedback collected from patients, friends, and family via the NHS Friends and Family Test (FFT).

Recently, the trust has witnessed a sharp increase in the volume of FFTs returned by SMS and PEP Health’s automated solution will save significant time and increase accuracy in analysing this feedback.

Nicky Burns-Muir, director of patient care and chief nurse at Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Ensuring our patients and, by extension, their families and friends have a positive experience while under our care is a top priority for the hospital.

“The insights we are getting from the PEP Health platform are already helping us identify where we can make tangible improvements to patient experience.

“The dashboard is quick, reliable, and easy to use, and also allows us to benchmark our insights against other acute trusts and national averages.

“And we’re confident it will help us to change the way we meet and exceed our patient experience targets.”

Using sophisticated machine learning trained on real patient comments, PEP Health analyses over one million comments a month for every hospital in the UK.

The insights we are getting from the PEP Health platform are already helping us identify where we can make tangible improvements to patient experience

It scores the comments one to five, with one being the worst and five being the best.

The data is then segmented by location, department, and by disease groups and the comments are tagged by eight internationally-recognised quality domains to give a 360-degree view of the care patients are experiencing.

These include fast access to healthcare services, emotional support, receiving effective treatment, communication, and involvement in decision making.

Mark Lomax, chief executive of PEP Health, said: “By listening to patients across the whole trust it will be able to gain deep quantitative and qualitative insights into how patients experience their care.

“Other trusts using the platform have been able to improve their patient experience scores by 35% in a short space of time.

“The insight is also really effective for staff engagement, which is particularly important during this period when staff are tired and under strain.”