Advanced Sentiment Analysis for Managing and Improving Patient Experience: Application for General Practitioner (GP) Classification in Northamptonshire

This paper presents a novel analytical approach for improving patients’ experience in healthcare settings. The analytical tool uses a classifier and a recommend management approach to facilitate decision making in a timely manner. The designed methodology comprises of 4 key stages, which include developing a bot to scrap web data while performing sentiment analysis and extracting keywords from National Health Service (NHS) rate and review webpages, building a classifier with Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA), analyzing speech with Python, and using Microsoft Excel for analysis. In the selected context, a total of 178 reviews were extracted from General Practitioners (GP) websites within Northamptonshire County, UK. Accordingly, 4764 keywords such as “kind”, “exactly”, “discharged”, “long waits”, “impolite staff”, “worse”, “problem”, “happy”, “late” and “excellent” were selected. In addition, 178 reviews were analyzed to highlight trends and patterns. The classifier model grouped GPs into gold, silver, and bronze categories. The outlined analytical approach complements the current patient feedback analysis approaches by GPs. This paper solely relied upon the feedback available on the NHS’ rate and review webpages. The contribution of the paper is to highlight the integration of easily available tools to perform higher level of analysis that provides understanding about patients’ experience. The context and tools used in this study for ranking services within the healthcare domain is novel in nature, since it involves extracting useful insights from the provided feedback.