New PEP Health Report Uses AI to Benchmark U.S. Hospital Patient Experience Trends

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Oct 03, 2023, 07:20 ET

Comprehensive report analyzes feedback from 25+ million patients to offer providers and insurers targeted insights for improving patient satisfaction and quality care performance

MINNEAPOLIS, Oct. 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- PEP Health, an AI-driven platform for collecting and analyzing real-time patient experience data, today released its first-ever comprehensive U.S. patient experience report offering deep quantitative and qualitative insights to provide an unbiased view of care quality through the perspective of the patient.

Leveraging the company's Patient Experience Platform (PEP), the AI-Powered Patient Experience Insights report combines patient feedback data from multiple AI-driven sources to deliver real-time reporting of what U.S. patients think about their care. Powered by industry-leading AI analytics and healthcare-based natural language processing, over the last six months PEP Health collected and analyzed more than 25 million patient comments from more than 8.5 million unique digital channels and more than 350,000 healthcare locations to deliver relevant feedback from patients about their care experiences.

"Timely, reliable, and statistically valid insights into patients' care experience across the U.S. has been virtually impossible to find until now," said PEP Health co-founder Meghan Leaver, PhD. "The Patient Experience Platform is groundbreaking not only because of its reach, depth, timeliness, and granular insights, but also because our solution offers proven, real-world recommendations to drive meaningful change around patients' experiences, which can directly translate to improved clinical outcomes and stronger financial performance."

Through a rigorous application of data science and proprietary AI algorithms, the report highlights trends and variations in patient experience across multiple care domains as well as hospital departmental service lines. In addition to a national snapshot of patient satisfaction, the report sheds light on what matters most to patients by spotlighting quality care achievements and growth areas, providing measurable and customized insights for health plans and health systems. With these real-time benchmarks, users can pinpoint gaps in patient experience across states, hospitals, and providers to address any care quality variations with highly targeted, accurate interventions.

"We believe all patients deserve the best care possible," added Leaver. "Our revolutionary platform transforms online patient feedback from every corner of the U.S. into real time, actionable insights that healthcare organizations, regulators, and insurers need to have a direct and dramatic impact on patient experiences."

30+ Insights Across Seven Care Quality Domains

Standard patient experience surveys, such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), typically have low response rates, population gaps, and outdated feedback, making them unreliable in capturing the true voice of the patient. Conversely, PEP Health delivers a continuously expanding, real-time perspective of patients' experiences based on a minimum representative sample size to ensure reliability, relevance, and inclusion.

The platform technology works by capturing patient feedback throughout its monitored digital channels, aggregating valid comments and reviews, and scoring performance across seven care quality domains – fast access, communication, effective treatment, continuity of care, emotional support, physical/environmental needs, and billing/administration. The result is an easily interpretable, highly informative dashboard measuring more than 30 actionable insights that can be configured and presented through numerous filters including by individual health system, facility, department, or provider, and across any of the care quality domains.

A Spotlight on Fast Access

Fast Access is the lifeline connecting patients in the U.S. to timely treatments and services from the right specialists. According to the report, however, patient experience with Fast Access has deteriorated, with thousands of patients across the U.S. reporting excessive delays over the last 12 months. As a result, the national Fast Access patient satisfaction rating – a cornerstone of patient experience – has sunk below a 3-star average.

"Healthcare access has been a challenge for decades as patients have faced issues such as overcrowded emergency rooms, narrow provider networks, and waiting months to see a physician specialist or for a procedure," said PEP Health CEO Mark Lomax, MD. "The pandemic clearly had an impact on access, and our report shows it remains the primary concern for patients today. Providers must take notice and prioritize efficient patient care access given the significant care quality and revenue gains, let alone the better health outcomes, these improvements can deliver."

The report dives deeper into the key issues underpinning this critical decline in care access, identifying four key metrics impacting patient satisfaction. Notably, across the U.S., waiting time for appointments emerges as the primary area of concern for patients. Other pain points include access to staff, booking and scheduling, and waiting time for treatment.

In addition to specific reasons why Fast Access scores are plummeting nationwide, the report highlights a growing disparity in patient satisfaction scores related to oncology care in the U.S. Other topics explored in the report include:

An overview of patient experience at hospitals and health systems across the U.S.
States that earned the highest and lowest patient experience scores for oncology care
How a health system's restructure led to volatile patient experience scores throughout its network
How PEP scores can predict HCAHPS Star Ratings up to nine months faster than internal surveys

Partnership for Healthcare Innovation

Texas Medical Center (TMC) home to the world's largest medical center, selected PEP Health as one of 16 digital health and medical device startups founded in the United Kingdom for a customized accelerator program at its Innovation Factory (TMCi).

"As healthcare evolves into a more consumer-oriented, competitive industry, understanding and improving the patient's care experience is becoming even more critical to an organization's success," said Devin Dunn, Head of the HealthTech Accelerator at TMCi. "The comprehensive, in-depth and unique perspective that PEP Health brings to patient experience will be essential intelligence guiding any such health system improvement for the foreseeable future."

PEP Health and other companies chosen for TMCi will be presenting at HLTH within the TMC pavilion (Booth #4336).

"PEP Health is proud to share with HLTH attendees how we harness AI and machine learning to deliver real-time reporting of what patients really think about their care and provide actionable insights to inform decisions," added Lomax. "By sharing our story and driving adoption of our one-of-a-kind platform, we can help deliver the optimal patient experiences that have the potential to transform healthcare and make a positive impact on patients' lives."

In addition to HLTH, more information and access to the full AI-Powered Patient Experience Insights report is available on the PEP Health website.

About PEP Health

PEP Health is a novel patient experience platform that uses AI to collect and analyze the views of patients on the health services they receive to help healthcare organizations pinpoint gaps and weaknesses in their system. Powered by cutting-edge machine learning technology, the company's Patient Experience Platform (PEP) listens to millions of public patient comments to deliver comprehensive real-time reporting of what patients think about their care and provide healthcare organizations, regulators, and insurers actionable insights which they can use to inform operational decisions that make a direct impact on the patient experience. For more information, visit www.pephealth.ai.

Media Contact:
Yancey Casey
Amendola Communications on behalf of PEP Health
(678) 895-9401
[email protected]

SOURCE PEP Health