Identifying Patient-Reported Care Experiences in Free-Text Survey Comments: Topic Modeling Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Patient-reported experience surveys allow administrators, clinicians, and researchers to quantify and improve health care by receiving feedback directly from patients. Existing research has focused primarily on quantitative analysis of survey items, but these measures may collect optional free-text comments. These comments can provide insights for health systems but may not be analyzed due to limited resources and the complexity of traditional textual analysis. However, advances in machine learning-based natural language processing provide opportunities to learn from this traditionally underused data source. Objective: This study aimed to apply natural language processing to model topics found in free-text comments of patient-reported experience surveys. Methods: Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems-derived patient experience surveys were collected and linked to administrative inpatient records by the provincial health services organization responsible for inpatient care. Unsupervised topic modeling with automated labeling was performed with BERTopic. Sentiment analysis was performed to further assist in topic description. Results: Between April 2016 and February 2020, 43.4% (43,522/100,272) adult patients and 46.9% (3501/7464) pediatric caregivers included free-text responses on completed patient experience surveys. Topic models identified 86 topics among adult survey responses and 35 topics among pediatric responses that included elements of care not currently surveyed by existing questionnaires. Frequent topics were generally positive. Conclusions: We found that with limited tuning, BERTopic identified care experience topics with interpretable automated labeling. Results are discussed in the context of person-centered care, patient safety, and health care quality improvement. Furthermore, we note the opportunity for the identification of temporal and site-specific trends as a method to identify patient care and safety concerns. As the use of patient experience measurement increases in health care, we discuss how machine learning can be leveraged to provide additional insight on patient experiences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.058 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".