Covenant Health Canada recently partnered with NovaceneAI to change the way Mission Inspired Culture survey comments were analyzed – saving time and achieving excellence.
Customer: Covenant Health | Category: Employee Engagement Insights
Table of Contents
The Challenge: Finding the Right Solution
The Solution: AI that Tells the Full Story
Results: Service Excellence and Actionable Insights
Executive Summary
Covenant Health Canada relies on information gleaned from verbatim comments collected as part of their Mission Inspired Culture (MIC) survey to spotlight areas of success as well as to identify opportunities for improvement. Kerry McKinstry, Manager, Organizational Development & Effectiveness, struggled to find a solution that would provide insights in a timely, efficient way, without introducing bias and human error.
The labour cost associated with manually transforming the thousands of verbatim comments gathered as part of the MIC survey was becoming untenable. Other business solutions McKinstry had access to, designed to deliver insight into employee sentiment, were outdated or lacked validity; it was clear that Covenant needed an innovative, intelligent solution.
NovaceneAI’s generative AI (GenAI) ability to analyze verbatim survey responses into themes, sentiment, and trends was just what the doctor ordered. Outcomes of the project included:
- 94% reduction in manual labour spent theming verbatim responses
- 23% increase in the validity of sentiment analysis (as compared to previous survey analyses)
- Improved system-wide efficiencies related to targeted leadership programming
- Nine organization and leader-specific verbatim reports, providing specific insights used for team action planning
- Four Covenant Health consultants trained on the use of the NovaceneAI platform
About Covenant Health
Covenant Health Canada is a Healthcare Service Provider in Alberta’s Integrated Health System, who currently operates 17 sites provincially. With over 12,000 employees, physicians, and volunteers, Covenant Health serves both urban and rural populations with services spanning acute care, mental health and addictions, and continuing and palliative care.
Named as one of Alberta’s Top 85 Employers in 2025, Covenant’s mission is to continue the healing ministry of Jesus by serving with compassion, upholding the sacredness of life in all stages, and caring for the whole person – body, mind, and soul. As part of their People and Culture Strategy, they are committed to retaining Mission driven employees, physicians and volunteers, and supporting them in discovering and deepening their own calling; it is for these reasons that the Mission Inspired Culture survey is of critical importance.
The Challenge: Finding the Right Solution
Covenant Health relies on the results of the MIC survey to inform the evolution of programs and services offered to employees, physicians, and volunteers. Specifically, the information gleaned from MIC verbatim comments are themed and presented across the organization to spotlight areas of success and identify opportunities for improvement. Recognizing that high-performing teams provide high-quality care, Covenant is committed to collecting data in ways that are meaningful, actionable, and ethical.
Historically, thousands of verbatim comments have been cleaned, themed, and analyzed for this purpose; for many years, McKinstry and her team did the job manually:
“Before we partnered with Novacene, we had literally an Excel spreadsheet, with multiple worksheets classifying the different themes, the positives and the negatives. We didn’t have resources internally, so it was just a few of us. It was hours upon hours of manual labour.”
Kerry McKinstry, Manager, Organizational Development & Effectiveness
Covenant Health Canada
This method presented two challenges:
Time
For McKinstry, an experienced data analyst herself, manually analyzing every response required more than 6 weeks’ dedicated time. Analyzing verbatim comments was a high-priority task as they provided needed context to accompany the MIC’s quantitative results. This meant she had to pause any other work and focus solely on data manipulation.
Accuracy and Bias
To manually analyze the responses, McKinstry segmented each response by theme and then performed manual thematic analysis. This method has the inherent risk of introducing human error and bias, which was compounded by the limited time available. Inevitably, employees disclose sensitive experiences as part of the MIC survey like racism and sexism in the workplace, subjects that are particularly difficult to categorize without bias. Relatability bias also plays a role. If McKinstry was having a bad day or had experienced a similar experience, certain comments would resonate with her more:
“The NovaceneAI Platform applies the same rules, through the same lens, to the data each and every time – eliminating bias and producing highly accurate, reliable, and comprehensive results. I’m so thankful we were able to find NovaceneAI because it has made a huge difference. The insights gleaned from these verbatims were much more powerful. What we’ve invested in the contract with NovaceneAI has more than paid for itself several times over.”
Kerry McKinstry, Manager, Organizational Development & Effectiveness
Covenant Health Canada
The Solution: AI that Tells the Full Story
McKinstry has a large portfolio and many competing priorities. Being new to working with GenAI, McKinstry set out to test and validate AI solutions on a small scale before entrusting anyone with the results of the annual MIC survey.
A validation test was performed on a representative sample of the previous MIC survey (2022) and the results were undeniable; NovaceneAI’s GenAI provided near-perfect sentiment analysis. After collaborating with experts in Covenant’s Privacy and Ethics departments, the use of NovaceneAI was greenlit. Covenant Health has a long history of innovation, priding itself on being at the forefront of service delivery excellence.
“Responsible use of AI in healthcare is on the minds of most people right now. In Alberta’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, being good stewards of the resources we’re entrusted with – both finances and feedback – is nonnegotiable. Finding a provider who could assure us that, with 100% certainty, our employee responses were protected was imperative – and the relatively small amount of dollars invested with NovaceneAI yielded huge systems savings in the form of recovered human labour costs.”
Daina Sparling, Organizational Development Consultant
Covenant Health
Results: Service Excellence and Actionable Insights
With the blessing from Ethics and Privacy in place, the NovaceneAI Platform was ready for Covenant Health to use. Within a few hours of receiving the raw data, thousands of mixed verbatim responses were separated and enriched in order to support sentiment and emotion analysis.
These enriched comments are the foundation the GenAI uses to create meaningful insights on what respondents are saying. A NovaceneAI Solutions Architect produced nine reports centred on the 10 themes identified in Covenant’s data by collaborating with the Platform’s interactive visualizations and GenAI. These reports were then sent to each of Covenant’s Senior Operating Officers to provide insight into the experience of their employees, physicians, and volunteers.
“By doing this kind of analysis, we helped quantify the qualitative. Covenant Health was able to put a number in front of its leadership and clearly identify an issue and how often it came up. It also showed leadership how many people talked about the strengths of working for the organization, what those strengths were, and the frequency with which they were mentioned. Quantifying this data helps Covenant Health close the gaps between issues in the workplace, and operational excellence.”
Beck Langstone, AI Solutions Architect
NovaceneAI
Covenant Health received personalized, expert-level support from the NovaceneAI team as their data was being analyzed and afterwards as they navigated the best way to visualize the results.
“NovaceneAI is a meaning maker,” said Sparling. The reports produced by the GenAI allow sometimes unwieldy qualitative responses to be transformed into the robust evidence McKinstry and her team need to drive continuous improvement in leadership programming at Covenant.
“The ability to rely on the accuracy – particularly of nuanced sentiment data – allows us to make commendations and focus on areas of improvement with confidence.”
Daina Sparling, Organizational Development Consultant
Covenant Health
With regards to the platform’s ability to protect confidential information, Sparling added “In a closed system like NovaceneAI, what we’re seeing is a huge organizational benefit with limited risk because of the guardrails that are in place. We are not exposing organizational data – oftentimes in these responses, people are talking about patients or sensitive experiences. Those things aren’t going into the ether, being used to teach other AI, or being stored outside of Canada, which was important to us.”
A Growing Partnership
Covenant Health hopes to engage NovaceneAI for verbatim analysis the next time their MIC survey launches. Additionally, they have recommended NovaceneAI to other internal collaborators on the basis of the company’s outstanding service delivery and the Platform’s stellar user experience.
What the Future Holds
AI continues to dominate healthcare innovation trends and service delivery globally. Covenant is committed to remaining at the forefront of responsible AI integration; as one of Alberta’s largest and fastest growing Healthcare Service Providers, they already have their eyes fixed on future projects that NovaceneAI could add value to and look forward to future partnering opportunities.
