Beneath the surface of talking about physicians: A statistical model of language for patient experience comments

This study applies natural language processing (NLP) techniques to patient experience comments. Our goal was to examine the language describing care experiences with two groups of physicians: those with scores in the top 100 and those with scores in the bottom 100 among all physicians (n=498) who received scores from patient satisfaction surveys. Our analysis showed a statistically significant difference in the language used to describe care experiences with these two distinct groups of physicians. This analysis illustrates how to apply NLP techniques in categorizing and building a statistical model for language use in order to identify meaningful language and significant phrasing in a dataset of natural language. We provide a review of limited work at the intersection of language analysis and patient experience. We present our analysis and conclude with a discussion on what care providers and patient experience leaders can learn from language used in patient experience comments for the delivery of patient-centered care. Experience Framework This article is associated with the Innovation & Technology lens of The Beryl Institute Experience Framework. (http://bit.ly/ExperienceFramework) Access other PXJ articles related to this lens. Access other resources related to this len