PEP Health analysis helps inform findings of CQC state of care report

We are delighted to share that current analysis by PEP Health has been used to inform the findings of the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC’s) annual assessment of the state of health and social care in England. The report – which used real-time data on patients’ experience of care from the PEP Health platform - highlighted the extraordinary pressures facing our emergency care and maternity services.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) recently published its annual assessment of the state of health and social care in England highlighting the tremendous pressures that our health and social care services are currently facing.

The report combines data from CQC inspections, ratings and patient experience metrics, as well as what is reported from those who deliver care across England, including midwifery and nursing professionals.

This year the assessment is that the health and care system is gridlocked and unable to operate effectively. In the report, CQC also highlights its concerns about specific service areas, in particular maternity services, where black mothers-to-be remain 4x more likely to die in childbirth than white mothers.

As part of this work, PEP Health was proud to be commissioned by the CQC to conduct a longitudinal analysis on patient experience across England, nationally and regionally, with a focus on urgent and emergency care (UEC) and maternity care.

The project presents the first time the CQC has commissioned an external body to conduct this type of research for the annual assessment.

PEP Health gathers, analyses and interprets patient feedback from across the web and combines it to create a patient experience score. As part of the project, we gathered more than 1 million potential comments from social media and review sites for all NHS trusts and GP practices in England, from the start of 2018 up to the end of August 2022.

More than 670,000 of these were relevant to the quality of care; 65,000 to urgent and emergency care; and more than 17,000 to maternity care. Sources used in the analysis included Care Opinion, Facebook, Google, NHS.uk and Twitter.

Our key findings show that:

-???????Patient experience across England, as measured by PEP Health, has fluctuated significantly since 2018, with COVID-19 unsurprisingly having a large impact.

-???????The South West and North East regions have the highest UEC patient experience and have done so for most of the past four years. London currently has the lowest patient experience scores.

-???????Regional trends for maternity care were similar to those for care overall and for UEC, with the North East and South West regions having the highest patient experience.

Providing hospitals with real-time insights

Since 2013, the Department of Health, Care Quality Commission (CQC) and NHS England, amongst others, have stated their support for the monitoring of online patient feedback to improve quality, but this has historically been difficult to do.

PEP Health provides a working, successful solution – the first to market – to support this ambition. Our technology – the first social listening tool that listens to patients in real-time – is also in line with the CQC’s new strategy which includes a big commitment use data better and in real-time.

Using machine learning and natural language processing, our platform gathers, analyses and interprets patient comments on multiple healthcare settings every year and combines it to create a ‘score’ of patient experience.

This data is gathered from a variety of sources with different user bases, resulting in diverse feedback – which has helped to inform an accurate picture of people’s experience for this report, alongside survey and other data.

Helping hospitals improve patient experience

We have been collecting data since 2018 for every hospital in the UK, scoring each patient comment on a scale of one to five, in particular focusing on access to services and maternity care. These comments are then themed and tagged to the relevant departments within hospitals.

The British Journal of Midwifery (BJM) recently published a case study of the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust's experiences in using the PEP Health platform to identify and gather publicly available feedback from social media and online patient groups, to obtain quality, timely and actionable feedback on maternity care.

… and keep their finger on the pulse

One of the most exciting things about our technology is that it gives a benchmark which we’ve never had before, so we can compare hospital A with hospital B from the patient’s point of view, for instance.

Our unique capabilities mean that we offer NHS Trusts the chance to monitor their patient experience in a contemporaneous and in-depth way, identifying how patients perceive their experience of care but also enabling Trusts to identify key variations in care and emerging safety issues.

As well as providing real time insights from patients using machine learning, our technology also serves as an Accurate predictor of CQC rating for hospitals. This means that the number that we generate with that overall score really matters. It’s a number that actually gives an insight about the quality of the providers.

In essence, allowing boards and managers to keep their finger on the pulse of the patient view so they can make a difference that really matters and in real time.

For more information about our technology go to www.pephealth.ai

To view the CQC’s annual assessment report, visit: https://www.cqc.org.uk/publication/state-care-202122