Transforming Patient and Provider Experiences into Actionable Insights for Pandemic Readiness, Resilience, and Recovery with an AI-Enabled Hospital System

Zahra Shakeri, Dalla Lana School of Public Health; Dionne M. Aleman, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Hospitals are the cornerstone of our health systems, providing critical support during public health crises. Ensuring the preparedness and resiliency of their operations is paramount for extended pandemic responses and ongoing recovery. During these critical moments of change, health systems must effectively adapt to daily challenges, ensuring practices are responsive, equitable, and sustainable. As frontlines during public health emergencies, they must recover quickly and sustain operations, continuously learning and adapting to provide safe and uninterrupted services. Critical insights on overall health system functioning, including aspects related to safety, timeliness, efficiency, equity, and staff wellbeing, can be derived from patient and provider experiences.

Prior research by our team explored the use of a large-scale dataset of 120,000 patient experience records collected from 45 Ontario hospitals to identify system strengths, gaps, and opportunities for improvement. Leveraging machine learning models for textual data, we identified factors influencing patient satisfaction both during and outside of the COVID-19 pandemic. After successfully designing methods to mitigate the effects of selection and social biases in patient experience records, and developing analytic approaches to derive actionable insights from this unstructured data, our next phase is focused on studying the integration of our analytic platform within health systems. By collaborating with health institutions in Ontario, we aim to evaluate the performance of an intelligent hospital platform that leverages real-time experience data from patients and care providers. With plans for nationwide expansion, this system will help promote equitable, responsive, and resilient health systems, improving health outcomes for all Canadians.