The British Columbia Patient-Centred Measurement Steering Committee’s Dynamic Analysis and Reporting Tool (the DART) is an online platform that provides 24/7 access to the voice of patients who have provided feedback about the quality and safety of their healthcare via provincially coordinated, scientifically rigorous patient surveys. The DART is available to anyone interested in tracking survey results in “close to real time”, reflecting the experiences and health-related quality of life of patients at unit, facility, health authority, and provincial levels, presented as aggregate, de-identified results.
Want to become a DART user? Email info.bcpcm@providencehealth.bc.ca for instructions on how to register.
As part of the registration process, you must watch the DART orientation video: https://youtu.be/fuxR22HmnS0
The video provides an orientation to the DART, resource materials (such as the survey instruments and Technical Reports), and a step-by-step tutorial on how to access basic descriptive statistics and run charts and how to create custom queries using a variety of filters; the platform also provides access to a searchable database of patients’ free-text comments. The video concludes with examples of how the DART has been used to improve patient care. Anyone can access the DART.
Already a DART user? Access the DART at: bcpcm.com/dart
Learn about another of our analysis tools, the British Columbia Office of Patient-Centred Measurement’s (BCOPCM) prototype tool, CAT-PX (Comment Analysis Toolkit for Patient eXperiences), for analyzing free text patient comments here.
In this video we describe the outcome of our work involving the application of technological tools to free text comments provided by patients who completed surveys about their experiences and outcomes of care in British Columbia. The tool is intended to be a technological adjunct to human review of patient experience qualitative data and to allow users to leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically natural language processing (NLP), to help in understanding patterns of sentiment and thematic content expressed in large volumes of free text patient narratives. In BC we conduct patient experience surveys consisting of both closed-ended and open-ended questions with the goal of using information from these surveys to improve the quality of healthcare delivered throughout the province. It is the open ended, free text patient comments that are the focus of the CAT-PX application. Free text comments are a rich source of data that can be used to improve quality of care and services, however, because the volume of comments patients provide when responding to our surveys is rapidly increasing, review (analysis) of this data is time consuming and labour intensive. That’s where NLP technologies come in. We invite you to watch our video to learn more about how CAT-PX can assist you in some aspects of the analysis process and enable discovery of patterns in the data that could be used to improve your patients’ experiences and overall quality of care.
Contact us, if you want more information about CAT-PX.