Article Text

Download PDFPDF
Development and testing of a text-mining approach to analyse patients’ comments on their experiences of colorectal cancer care
  1. Richard Wagland1,
  2. Alejandra Recio-Saucedo1,
  3. Michael Simon2,3,
  4. Michael Bracher1,
  5. Katherine Hunt1,
  6. Claire Foster1,
  7. Amy Downing4,
  8. Adam Glaser4,
  9. Jessica Corner1
  1. 1Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
  2. 2Institute of Nursing Science, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
  3. 3Directorate of Nursing/AHP, Inselspital Bern University Hospital, Bern, Switzerland
  4. 4Leeds Institute of Cancer & Pathology, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Richard Wagland, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Southampton, Building 67, Highfield Campus, Southampton SO171BJ, UK; R.Wagland{at}soton.ac.uk

Abstract

Background Quality of cancer care may greatly impact on patients’ health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Free-text responses to patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) provide rich data but analysis is time and resource-intensive. This study developed and tested a learning-based text-mining approach to facilitate analysis of patients’ experiences of care and develop an explanatory model illustrating impact on HRQoL.

Methods Respondents to a population-based survey of colorectal cancer survivors provided free-text comments regarding their experience of living with and beyond cancer. An existing coding framework was tested and adapted, which informed learning-based text mining of the data. Machine-learning algorithms were trained to identify comments relating to patients’ specific experiences of service quality, which were verified by manual qualitative analysis. Comparisons between coded retrieved comments and a HRQoL measure (EQ5D) were explored.

Results The survey response rate was 63.3% (21 802/34 467), of which 25.8% (n=5634) participants provided free-text comments. Of retrieved comments on experiences of care (n=1688), over half (n=1045, 62%) described positive care experiences. Most negative experiences concerned a lack of post-treatment care (n=191, 11% of retrieved comments) and insufficient information concerning self-management strategies (n=135, 8%) or treatment side effects (n=160, 9%). Associations existed between HRQoL scores and coded algorithm-retrieved comments. Analysis indicated that the mechanism by which service quality impacted on HRQoL was the extent to which services prevented or alleviated challenges associated with disease and treatment burdens.

Conclusions Learning-based text mining techniques were found useful and practical tools to identify specific free-text comments within a large dataset, facilitating resource-efficient qualitative analysis. This method should be considered for future PROM analysis to inform policy and practice. Study findings indicated that perceived care quality directly impacts on HRQoL

  • Healthcare quality improvement
  • Qualitative research
  • Quality measurement
  • Quality improvement methodologies

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.