Summary

The government has ordered the patients’ health service, where the patient's voice must be heard, including strengthening the involvement of patients in decisions and the development and evaluation of health services. An important patient-oriented tool at the national level is the national system for measurement of patient experiences. Free-text comments from these surveys are considered highly relevant and actionable by clinicians and managers aiming to improve quality, but are mostly unused due to the time and resources needed to analyse patient comments. There is thus a clear need for an innovative and highly efficient method for analysing large amounts of patient comments. The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a branch of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, is concerned with automated analysis of human language. One application of particular relevance is sentiment analysis. The task of sentiment analysis is to (i) identify subjective opinions and attitudes expressed in text, (ii) detect whether the opinion has a positive or negative polarity, and (iii) identify who/what are the targets and holders of the opinion. Moreover, in so-called aspect-based sentiment analysis the task is additionally to (iv) map the identified targets to more general topic categories. While machine-based sentiment analysis has been introduced as a way of analysing comments from patients in health services research, these tools are both domain- and language-specific and we presently lack tools to analyse Norwegian text in the medical domain. This project will develop and test resources and tools for aspect-based sentiment analysis of comments in Norwegian language. We will use patient comments from NIPHs national surveys and from social media and other online user-generated content (UGC) like Facebook, Twitter and Legelisten.no. Online UGC represents an innovative data source, with a potential to further empower patients in health service measurement and quality improvement.

See the full project description at Cristin for more information about results, researchers, contact information etc.

Project participants

Project leader

Øyvind Andresen Bjertnæs, Norwegian Institute of Public Health

Project participants

Lene Therese Bergerud Linnemørken, Norwegian Institute of Public Health
Kirsten Danielsen, Norwegian Institute of Public Health
Petter Mæhlum, University of Oslo
Rebecka Maria Norman, Norwegian Institute of Public Health
Erik Velldal, University of Oslo
Lilja Øvrelid, University of Oslo
Lina Harvold Ellingsen-Dalskau, Norwegian Institute of Public Health
Elma Jelin, Norwegian Institute of Public Health
Hilde Karin Hestad Iversen, Norwegian Institute of Public Health