NarrativeDx

NarrativeDx is a healthcare analytics company based in Austin, Texas that applies natural language processing and machine learning to unstructured patient feedback. Its cloud-based, HIPAA-compliant platform collects comments from internal sources such as government-mandated CAHPS surveys, grievance letters, focus groups and patient portals, as well as external sources including social review sites such as Facebook, Yelp and physician review sites, and returns the analysis to hospitals as dashboards, charts and graphs.

The platform analyzes comments at a per-phrase level to identify sentiment, named doctors and nurses, key themes, procedures and readmission risk, and highlights areas for improvement across staff, physicians, units and facilities together with specific recommendations. The company positions the output as a bridge between quantitative and qualitative patient data, intended to support patient experience improvement, referral volume, hospital revenue and reputation. As of early 2019 the company was extending the approach to physician and nurse feedback, with a product line aimed at reducing clinician burnout and turnover then running in pilot clinics.

Founding story

NarrativeDx was founded in 2014 by Kyle Robertson, an AI engineer and intellectual property lawyer with a JD, and Senem Guney, PhD. Guney developed the concept during her doctoral research in organizational communication and technology at UT-Austin and her consultancy work at IBM, and had previously been a faculty member at SUNY Albany and a fellow at the Center for Technology in Government. Robertson had earlier founded the mobile crowd-funding platform iCare, worked as an intellectual property attorney at WilmerHale in Boston, and worked as a software engineer at National Instruments in Austin. The company was founded on the principle that patient voices matter and that insights drawn from patients' own words can improve patient-centered care.

Business model

NarrativeDx sells a SaaS analytics platform to healthcare providers and organizations, and works with patient experience and informatics leaders as well as consultancies to deploy it across departments and providers.

Software-as-a-service platform sold to hospitals and health systems.

Traction

The company reported reported improvements in patient experience measures of 80 percent and outpatient referral increases of over $50 million among users, and stated in May 2017 that it was on track to grow its client base tenfold that year. Total funding reached $7.1 million as of February 2019.

Latest developments

In February 2019 NarrativeDx announced a $3 million strategic investment led by Christiana Care Health System, the Texas Medical Center and Summation Health Ventures, and disclosed a new product line analyzing physician and nurse feedback to address clinician burnout and turnover. The NarrativeDx application login is now presented under Press Ganey Associates LLC branding, with account and support requests directed to Press Ganey.