AMS Machine Learning Study for Boston Children’s Hospital Wins Quirk’s Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Award

Applied Marketing Science, Inc. (AMS) is pleased to announce that a recent study conducted on behalf of Boston Children’s Hospital was awarded the 2023 Quirk’s Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Award – Health Care/Pharmaceutical Research Project. The award winners were selected by a panel of 45 judges after considering more than 200 submissions across several categories. Powered by Quirk’s Media, the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards shine a much-deserved spotlight on the researchers, vendors, products, and services adding value and impact to marketing research. 

“It is an honor for our client and for us to be selected for this award. This project used artificial intelligence (AI) to produce detailed, organized, and actionable insights for the Boston Children’s team. We look forward to continuing to explore novel applications of AI to provide our clients with the insights they need to succeed and better serve their customers,” said AMS Principal Carmel Dibner, who oversaw the study.  

Boston Children’s, a pediatric hospital ranked on the Pediatric Honor Roll for more than 20 years by U.S. News & World Report, asked AMS to apply machine learning to better understand the patient journey for pediatric specialty and complex care. AMS used its Automated Content Evaluator (ACE™), an algorithm developed in collaboration with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management to identify customer needs and provide input for a detailed journey map. Once trained, ACE™ can process hundreds of thousands of lines of readily available user-generated content, quickly identifying needs and discovering hidden gems of insights.  

In this case, ACE™ helped analyze more than 66 thousand sentences from both public and internal patient family-generated discussions on topics such as provider selection, diagnostic testing, and condition management, among others, to more fully identify the stages, needs, and emotional sentiment along the journey map – beyond what is typically uncovered by traditional marketing research. Working with the Boston Children’s team, AMS produced a detailed patient journey map that included 133 needs across more than a dozen phases of the pediatric patient journey. This study provided Boston Children’s with actionable information to further improve the experiences of patients and their families as they face medically complex situations. 

To learn more about this study, view the recording of "Leveraging AI for Customer Journey Mapping Success: Boston Children’s Hospital Case Study" presented jointly by Carmel Dibner of AMS and Stephanie Zawacki of Boston Children’s Hospital.