Thinking about its mission to make healthcare workers’ jobs easier during the pandemic, PerfectServe, a healthcare communications services company, was brainstorming ways to leverage its communications data to better understand clinicians' behaviors.
The company wondered whether it could identify evidence of burnout or frustration expressed through emoji.
But it discovered just the opposite—emoji were overwhelmingly used to convey politeness and positive intent. In fact, clinical teams used emoji that were “far more positive in tone” than how the general public use them, according to the company's available data.
PerfectServe relied on nearly 16,000 messages from five of its highest-volume customer organizations in the major areas of the U.S. from April 2020 and April 2021. Emoji use did not increase or decrease notably between the two time periods, and was found to convey positive emotions most often.
The most common symbol found was the thumbs-up, followed by a smiling face and the praying icon. While practitioners were more likely to send emoji than other care team members, internal medicine clinicians were more likely than other specialties to use these symbols, accounting for a quarter of total clinical emoji use in the data.
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The most popular time to send emoji was identified as Thursday at 3 p.m., followed by Friday at 2 p.m. That could indicate clinical teams preparing patients for discharge before the weekend, the report said.
One reason emoji are not popular among other care team members like nurses, the report suggested, is because most nursing staff are not equipped with smartphones to communicate in the clinical setting. PerfectServe expects this to change and emoji use to grow going forward, as having smartphones can enable more efficient and effective patient care. This is something the company itself is advocating for among its customers.
Some physicians have made the case for the development of a comprehensive set of medical emoji. In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association last year, Shuhan He, M.D., a faculty member at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Laboratory of Computer Science, and other researchers wrote about use cases for medical emoji ranging from helping patients communicate their symptoms or pain levels to making discharge instructions more comprehensible.
Other researchers have advocated for using emoji or symbols in health campaigns and public health messaging, especially when there are language barriers.
Following the release of the study’s results, one PerfectServe customer expressed interest in examining this data in the future across their own organization, said Matt Kothe, corporate communications manager at PerfectServe.
But most did not go that far, demonstrating “how much we are at the beginning of the conversation with these places,” Kothe told Fierce Healthcare.
While there could be a lot of benefit to using emoji in the clinical setting, like relieving stress, it will require careful conversations by organizations about protocol that could be developed to help ensure professionalism. “More positivity is needed in medicine,” the report concluded.