Text mining in long-term care: Exploring the usefulness of artificial intelligence in a nursing home setting

OBJECTIVES: In nursing homes, narrative data are collected to evaluate quality of care as perceived by residents or their family members. This results in a large amount of textual data. However, as the volume of data increases, it becomes beyond the capability of humans to analyze it. This study aims to explore the usefulness of text mining approaches regarding narrative data gathered in a nursing home setting. DESIGN: Exploratory study showing a variety of text mining approaches. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: Data has been collected as part of the project ‘Connecting Conversations’: assessing experienced quality of care by conducting individual interviews with residents of nursing homes (n = 39), family members (n = 37) and care professionals (n = 49). METHODS: Several pre-processing steps were applied. A variety of text mining analyses were conducted: individual word frequencies, bigram frequencies, a correlation analysis and a sentiment analysis. A survey was conducted to establish a sentiment analysis model tailored to text collected in long-term care for older adults. RESULTS: Residents, family members and care professionals uttered respectively 285, 362 and 549 words per interview. Word frequency analysis showed that words that occurred most frequently in the interviews are often positive. Despite some differences in word usage, correlation analysis displayed that similar words are used by all three groups to describe quality of care. Most interviews displayed a neutral sentiment. Care professionals expressed a more diverse sentiment compared to residents and family members. A topic clustering analysis showed a total of 12 topics including ‘relations’ and ‘care environment’. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: This study demonstrates the usefulness of text mining to extend our knowledge regarding quality of care in a nursing home setting. With the rise of textual (narrative) data, text mining can lead to valuable new insights for long-term care for older adults.