How Health Systems Use Emotional Support Insights as Operational Intelligence
Emotional support is one of the clearest and most consequential signals patients share about their healthcare experiences.
Across social media commentary and online reviews, millions of people describe how care felt in moments of fear, uncertainty, and vulnerability – whether interactions felt human, whether they were shown compassion and empathy, and whether they felt supported during difficult diagnoses, recoveries, and personal losses.
These impressions are often formed at the first touchpoint with a service and are among the earliest performance signals to surface in unsolicited feedback. They carry through the rest of the care journey, shaping how patients show up, engage, and make choices at every stage, including whether they choose a provider, follow their treatment plan, return for future care, or seek care elsewhere.
Where Emotional Support Becomes a Blind Spot
For most doctors and care teams, delivering safe, effective treatment is paramount. Under intense time pressure, staffing constraints, and administrative burden, how care is perceived emotionally can feel secondary, even when intentions are good.
At the same time, clinicians and care teams are increasingly held accountable for emotional support outcomes. Surveys such as HCAHPS, which are tied to value-based reimbursement and performance evaluation, attempt to measure aspects of emotional support, but only partially. They rely on a small number of questions focused on doctor and nurse communication during an inpatient stay. Responses are delayed, episodic, and drawn from a limited subset of patients, often skewing older and more homogeneous.
This leaves clinicians and leaders in a difficult position. Teams know they are at risk of being penalized, but lack the clarity needed to understand where emotional support is breaking down, why it is happening, or what to do differently to improve it.
How PEP Health Turns Emotional Support Into Operational Intelligence
The answer is not to add more surveys. Analysis by PEP Health shows that roughly one in nine people in the United States already share their healthcare experiences publicly online. Within this feedback, patients, families, and caregivers provide rich, detailed accounts of their emotional experiences across the care journey.
Too often, this feedback is handled at the surface. Health systems acknowledge it politely with a standard “thank you for your feedback,” redirect dissatisfied patients to a complaints process, or pass positive comments to marketing teams for promotional use. While these responses may be well intentioned, they treat emotional support feedback as something to close out, manage, or showcase, rather than as a source of insight to learn from.
Handled this way, the underlying signal is lost. Teams respond to individual comments, but rarely step back to ask what patterns are emerging, where emotional support is consistently breaking down, or which moments in the care journey are creating friction for patients and families.
Forward-thinking leaders take a different approach. They move beyond individual responses and use emotional support feedback to identify recurring themes, pressure points, and root causes across services and settings. Instead of asking how this makes them look, they ask what needs to change.
By analyzing this feedback at scale, PEP Health turns the narratives patients are sharing online into a richer, more actionable source of operational intelligence. Clinical, experience, operations, strategy, finance, marketing, and growth teams can align around priorities and address issues systemically rather than in silos.
Emotional support becomes something teams are supported to improve, not simply measured against – with direct links to acquisition, adherence, retention, market share growth, workforce well-being, more effective resource allocation, revenue protection, and value-based performance.
How PEP Health Measures Emotional Support
PEP Health’s Emotional Support domain captures how patients and families experience compassion, empathy, and interpersonal care across the healthcare journey.
Rather than treating emotional support as a single, abstract concept, the domain makes it observable and comparable at multiple levels, from overall organizational performance to variation by site and service line. Emotional Support is scored on a standardized five-point scale, enabling leaders to track performance over time, benchmark against competitors, and see where they are gaining or losing ground.
This approach has been validated through peer-reviewed research against HCAHPS, demonstrating strong alignment with established experience measures and confirming it as a leading indicator of hospital performance. The work has also been featured in Becker’s Hospital Review, reflecting its relevance for leaders navigating quality, safety, and value-based performance.
The domain also surfaces the specific drivers shaping Emotional Support experiences. Patient feedback is analyzed across two distinct subdomains: Interpersonal Skills, such as patience, kindness, empathy, and bedside manner, and Meeting Emotional Needs, which reflects how emotionally supported and psychologically safe patients and families feel throughout the care journey.
Together, this turns emotional support into a clear, trusted signal that leaders can use to understand performance, prioritize improvement, and act with confidence across the system.
How Health Systems Are Using Emotional Support Insights in Practice
Leading health systems are embedding Emotional Support insights directly into day-to-day decision-making, using them to guide where to intervene, whom to support, and which moments in the care journey require attention.
Team Education and Communication
Clinical and experience leaders use Emotional Support insights for team education and communication training. Instead of relying on generic guidance about empathy or bedside manner, teams review patterns in patient feedback that highlight where communication feels rushed, dismissive, or unclear.
Community Engagement, Trust-Building, and Purposeful Pause Initiatives
Health systems use Emotional Support insights to identify moments in the care journey where stress, uncertainty, or disconnection are highest, and where small changes in presence, communication, or reassurance can have an outsized impact.
These signals inform purposeful pause initiatives and community engagement strategies, helping teams recognize when patients and families need additional explanation, emotional presence, or reassurance. By targeting these moments deliberately, organizations can reduce anxiety, strengthen trust, and support better engagement without adding significant burden to care teams.
Concierge Services
The healthcare experience begins well before a clinical encounter and extends far beyond it. Leading health systems recognize that every interaction shapes how care is perceived and use Emotional Support signals to inform concierge services, identifying where a more human, service-oriented response can meaningfully improve the experience outside of clinical care.
From a customer service perspective, this insight is critical. Patients often remember how they were treated by the people on the phone and behind the desks. Guided by emotional support signals, concierge services become a trusted point of connection, making the experience feel attentive, proactive, and responsive rather than transactional.
Supporting Families and Loved Ones
Emotional support does not stop with the patient. Families and loved ones often experience significant stress, fear, and uncertainty alongside the person receiving care, particularly during complex diagnoses, acute events, or end-of-life situations.
Emotional Support insights help organizations understand how care is experienced by those supporting the patient, not just the patient themselves. Feedback highlights where families feel informed and included, as well as where they feel overlooked, excluded, or unsure how to help.
Health systems use these signals to make more intentional accommodations for families, from clearer communication and expectation-setting to small but meaningful acts of presence and reassurance. By recognizing and addressing the emotional needs of loved ones, organizations strengthen trust, reduce conflict, and create care environments that feel more compassionate and supportive for everyone involved.
Identifying Pressure Points Across Services and Settings
At an organizational level, leaders use Emotional Support insights to understand variation across departments, service lines, and care settings. Patterns in patient feedback highlight where emotional support is consistently strong and where teams may be under strain.
These signals often correlate with workload, staffing pressure, and burnout risk, making them relevant not only for experience improvement, but also for workforce planning, support, and well-being. Leaders gain visibility into where teams need help, not just where scores are low.
Understanding Competitive Performance and Patient Choice
Emotional Support insights also allow leaders to look beyond their own organization. By comparing performance across peer hospitals and competing systems in the same market, organizations can see where competitors are outperforming them on compassion, empathy, and meeting emotional needs.
This external perspective helps explain patient movement, leakage, and loyalty through the lens of experience, and supports more informed decisions about where to focus improvement efforts to sustain and grow market share.
From Insight to Foresight and Sustained Improvement
Because Emotional Support insights are continuously refreshed, leaders gain early visibility into emerging risks and trends that can affect business outcomes.
Rather than responding retrospectively, organizations can intervene while there is still time to act, addressing emotional support gaps before they become embedded patterns or begin to affect adherence, retention, market share, or revenue.
When used alongside established measures, Emotional Support insights help organizations move from measurement to management, providing the clarity teams need to act with confidence, align across functions, and improve care in ways patients can feel and that organizations can sustain.
To find out how our insights can support your organization, email hello@pephealth.ai.
