PEP Health has been awarded an NHS England and NHS Improvement contract to evaluate patient feedback on rare and less common cancers to improve patient experience and outcomes.
As part of the NHS’s continued drive for quality improvement, this new contract will support a range of NHS providers who diagnose and treat people with rare and less common cancers in England with a baseline of patient experience, as well as trends and insights to learn from, derived from the PEP Health platform. Patient experience will then be reviewed again by our platform after six months to identify where quality improvements have been made and areas where further work is needed.
Understanding patient experience can be a challenge for the NHS due to the difficulties in collecting robust feedback and the time it takes to gather insights from the data before changes can be implemented. The PEP Health platform addresses these issues by utilising channels where patients are already providing a wealth of patient experience feedback and harnessing this data to drive action in real-time.
Our platform comprehensively and cost effectively collates and categorises patient experience insights from over 1 million comments per month, including digital sources such as publicly available social media posts and online forums, as well as traditional sources like the Friends and Family Test and providing a more complete picture of patients’ views on the health services they encounter in real-time.
This radical approach offers providers, commissioners and regulators a new opportunity to recognise and learn from outstanding areas of care, whilst also rapidly identifying any safety concerns and areas for improvement or evaluation.
To provide its insights, the platform uses advanced machine learning algorithms custom built for the healthcare sector and sophisticated natural language processing, to accurately categorise comments based on the three areas of care quality: safety, effectiveness and patient experience. Only comments posted publicly are analysed ensuring privacy is maintained throughout.
Dr Mark Lomax, CEO of PEP Health, said:
“Cancer services were identified as a priority in the NHS Long Term Plan and so we’re pleased to be supporting the NHS’s quality improvement work in this area. In addition, the focus of the contract on rare and less common cancer treatment really demonstrates how refined our platform can be. Regular monitoring and reviewing of patient experience using our platform tends to see significant improvements in patient experience and we look forward to working with the NHS to address inequalities and drive improvements in the quality of care for these patients.”
Claire Marshall, Experience of Care Lead – Acute Care, NHS England and NHS Improvement said:
“We’re delighted to partner with PEP Health in this innovative project to test whether using social media analysis in this way can demonstrate additional insights into improvement work at a selection of trusts in the Rare and Less Common Cancers Improvement Collaborative.”
If you’re interested in the PEP Health platform or would like to benefit from a more complete picture of patients’ views on the health services they encounter, please contact enquires@pephealth.ai.