Use Sentiment Marketing to Improve Patient Experience

Every day, hospitals and ASCs (ambulatory surgical centers) strive to improve the patient experience and get the best outcomes possible. In utilizing sentiment analysis and marketing, they access data that helps them optimize patients’ experiences and track response to services in real-time.

Sentiment marketing begins when you start addressing the comments your patients make based on the results of your sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis refers to technology that helps marketers determine and understand the emotional tone of online responses to brands and marketing campaigns. This makes use of algorithms and new technologies to classify and analyze opinions about your facility. However, it does not stop at opinions. It analyzes attitudes and emotions expressed in each comment. Sentiment analysis reads more into every response and draws the true meaning behind the words.

Sentiment analysis helps marketers make sense of social media opinions. You get honest and real-time data without the additional expense of reaching out to your audiences for feedback. Additionally, it does not focus on the loudest or most aggressive voices. You can access the opinions of your entire audience for a realistic and holistic assessment.

As technology and consumer trends change, medical marketers must shift their focus to creating holistic experiences that appeal to their patients with emphasis on two focus areas.

Brand Strategy

Sentiment analysis allows you to track more than just your business. You can monitor industry trends and your competitors. This helps you improve your brand strategy. Proper utilization of sentiment analysis and big data analytics allows you to personalize and improve patient experiences, which improves loyalty and revenues for your facility.

Predictive analytics helps you track and identify patient behavior from data available on social and open-source platforms. With this data, you can predict patient expectations and create experiences that meet their needs in a timely fashion.

Online reviews, ratings, and CAHPS scores play an important role in helping healthcare providers assess their patients’ experiences. With sentiment analysis, your facility can use the data to edge out competition by optimizing experiences based on patient needs.

The sentiment analysis strategy allows you to classify comments from patient surveys and online comments into categories such as nursing, physicians, pain management, discharge, facilities, and services. With the data, you can now create an integrated patient experience that allows you to:

• Quantify performance – Scoring comments helps you quantify the patient experience and identify areas that need improvement.

• Get In-Depth Insight – Converting opinions into data gives a deeper understanding of factors affecting medical care reimbursement and performance of individual factors in the patient experience.

• Motivate Staff – For example, with access to over 20-percent more positive comments than negative comments, you have enough data to encourage your staff to keep up good habits. Negative comments also challenge the staff to work toward creating a more positive patient experience.

Patient Satisfaction and the Revenue Cycle

It is well recognized that patient satisfaction is directly related to a patient’s commitment to pay. This is especially important during a time when patients’ healthcare costs are rising. Therefore, it is in the best interest of every hospital and ASC to make their patients’ experience a priority.  Hospitals and ASCs with a well-established marketing strategy and who are looking to make patient satisfaction top of the line should consider sentiment analysis as the next step for taking their services, and likely the success of their patient collections, to the next level.