By Nicole Lama | DHIT Intern | March 25, 2020
There’s a proverb that says: “Kind words are worth so much and cost so little.” In other words, it costs nothing to offer a compliment to your neighbor, but you may have just made her day. Your neighbor might find you later and tell you: “you are such an incredible person. I appreciate you in my life”. Hearing comments like this are validating and inform us of the positive impact we have on others. Unfortunately, these compliments often remain private, or worse, forgotten. Often, we validate ourselves with our education, our income, or our possessions, but very rarely do we get the opportunity to show our impact through the positive responses we receive from our community.
During my first week at DHIT, our President, Michael Levy, approached me with a similar dilemma. Seeing as how DHIT is in its fourth year of operations it is about time that we wrote a report which illustrates our impact on the ecosystem. While many companies include economic metrics such as financial expenditure in their impact reports. DHIT’s impact is mostly centered on transforming healthcare by cultivating and educating a community. Even though this is just as valuable as any monetary impact, it is much harder to measure.
Therefore, rather than analyzing our financial data to determine our total economic impact, I decided to aggregate all of the testimonials, feedback, and endorsements DHIT has received over time. That was the easy part. The challenge was displaying three years’ worth of compliments and presenting its value in a polished report. It’s not like you can just copy and paste everything into a huge block of text and call it a day!
Or…can you?
I started by collecting all DHIT’s feedback, endorsements, and testimonials since its inception in 2017. As a simple way to comprehensively explore our testimonials, I made word clouds! Word clouds are visualizations that summarize words in a body of text. They also show the frequency of words by assigning a larger font size to more frequently used words and smaller font size to less frequent words. I am a huge fan of word clouds because they are visually pleasing, and they give a big picture overview of a body of text in seconds.
Here are some word clouds generated from our testimonials categorized by DHIT events.
When you look at the word clouds, you Immediately see words like “great” and “enjoyable”, which suggest overall positivity! However, there are some other word clouds that are more ambiguous, like those for Design Day or the Summit.
To reduce the ambiguity, I would need to calculate a score that unambiguously measures customer satisfaction. I thought of social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook that provide their tweets and posts to entities, such as companies or celebrities. These posts are valuable because you can determine if people are generally saying positive or negative things about a product or person through a process called sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis will take a body of words, known as a corpus, and will output a score between -1 and 1 for each word. If the score is above 0.2 it is considered positive, if the score is below -0.2, the text is considered negative. If a word falls between the range of -0.2 and 0.2, it is considered neutral. While this score is technically called a polarity score, for DHIT’s purposes, I will refer to it as the net experience score. Our net experience score is a measure of our ecosystem’s satisfaction with DHIT.
Luckily, sentiment analysis is relatively straightforward to implement with just a few lines of computer code! Stay tuned for a future post describing the technical details of my analysis. To summarize, I took the average of all the negatively scored words and the positive words in each testimonial to obtain DHIT’s net experience score.
Above, I plotted the net experience scores for our testimonials. They range from 0.3 to 1.0, suggesting overall satisfaction. I then took the average of these scores to obtain a net experience score of approximately 0.7, which is overwhelmingly positive! Now, we have an intuitive way to numerically show the impact DHIT has had on our community. The word cloud below summarizes all of DHIT’s testimonials that contributed to the net experience score.
Since DHIT’s mission to enable a world without health inequity involves cultivating and educating our community on digital health, I was pleased to see “community”, “experience” and “digital health” were some of the most frequent phrases in our testimonials.
By using a net experience score, we were able to validate our approach and quantify the impact our team has had in such a short span of time.