By Evan Steele, Founder and CEO, rater8
LinkedIn: Evan Steele
LinkedIn: rater8
There is a stigma that patients respond to post-visit satisfaction surveys from healthcare providers only when they’ve had a negative experience. While it’s true that unhappy patients are often more inclined to share feedback than satisfied ones, capturing feedback across the full spectrum of the patient experience provides the most accurate reflection of your organization’s quality of care and is vital to practice success. A wide range of feedback data also ensures providers can feel confident in making decisions that will drive improvements.
Fortunately, satisfied patients can be motivated to express their opinions — you just have to give them a voice.
The Importance of Patient Feedback
Patient feedback is crucial for healthcare organizations to foster continuous improvement and ensure providers maintain high standards of care. In an era where patients can find an abundance of healthcare advice and provider recommendations online, they’re more likely than ever to turn to search engines for help in switching providers after just one unsatisfactory experience.
It is therefore crucial to learn how patients perceive your organization, and this means being open to feedback. Offering a fast and easy outlet that allows patients to give honest feedback is a meaningful first step in identifying strengths to lean on and shortcomings to improve, ultimately leading to practice improvement, satisfied patients, and greater new patient acquisition and retention rates.
Creating Surveys That Get Responses
To ensure patient feedback accurately reflects the experiences of as many of your patients as possible, it’s important to deliver surveys they’ll actually complete.
Here are a few strategies to achieve higher response rates:
- Keep Surveys Concise: Long surveys can be daunting and time-consuming, deterring patients from completing them. Focus on the five most critical questions that can provide the insights necessary to make effective decisions. If you need data on a wide range of topics, consider randomizing and rotating your questions.
- Use a 5-Star Rating Scale: Don’t reinvent the wheel — the classic 5-star rating system is a century in the making, and today’s patients take ratings into strong consideration when making decisions about their healthcare.
- Use Plain Language: To get the most out of surveys, it’s best to avoid medical jargon and stick to layman’s terms.
- Ditch Paper Delivery Methods: People check their phones and emails constantly, making these delivery methods more effective in achieving higher response rates than paper surveys at the checkout desk or surveys that arrive in the mail weeks after an appointment. Before partnering with a digital survey vendor, ensure they are following necessary regulatory frameworks such as HIPAA compliance, HITRUST certification, and SOC 2 certification.
- Ensure Anonymity: Patients are more likely to provide honest feedback if they’re certain their responses are anonymous.
- Avoid Survey Fatigue: Do not bombard patients with surveys. Whether you’re sending surveys manually or via an automated system, set up redundancy protection to ensure returning patients are not sent surveys for the same provider for a defined period of time (e.g., 45 days).
Benchmarking in Healthcare
Organizations looking to stay ahead of the curve, reduce risk in decision-making, and edge out competitors cannot afford to overlook benchmarking as a key tool in their operations. Collecting satisfaction survey responses and comparing results against industry standards helps providers identify areas in need of improvement, implement changes, and ultimately enhance the patient experience.
There are four distinct types of benchmarking in healthcare, each with their own unique set of benefits:
- Internal Benchmarking: A comparison of an organization against itself, such as department vs. department, or examining the same department among hospitals within the same health system. To establish internal benchmarks, providers should aim to identify parameters that are both configurable and scalable across various levels of the organization. This involves segmenting the organization into management units, defining key performance indicators, setting realistic goals, and making necessary adjustments.
- Competitive Benchmarking: A comparison of an organization’s performance against competitors on a local, regional, and national level. To establish competitive benchmarks, organizations can start by identifying their direct competitors who offer similar services, as they provide the most relevant industry insights.
- Functional Benchmarking: A comparison of processes and methods within identical business functions outside the immediate industry, wherein the entities being compared are not in competition with one another. For instance, a cardiology practice may consider benchmarking its waiting room time, scheduling experience, and check-in experience data against that of an orthopedic practice.
- Generic Benchmarking: A comparison of how core processes or functions are practiced in a similar way, without regard to the industry, to gain a new perspective and way of thinking. For example, a healthcare organization with low check-in experience scores might seek inspiration from a high-ranking hotel or other hospitality entity to increase those scores.
Motivating Providers and Staff Through Benchmarking
Benchmarks can be used as intrinsic motivators for employees. Healthcare organizations can make a point to celebrate exceeded performance expectations through material rewards like cookies or flowers, internal celebrations like awards programs, or even an “employee hall of fame” to display accomplishments for the entire organization to see. This not only boosts employee morale, but can enhance overall quality of care and foster a culture of excellence within your organization.
For areas in need of improvement, try setting team goals rather than singling out individuals, especially physicians. One such real-life example occurs regularly at Gonzaba Medical Group: “We present data for providers without showing names, so they don’t see individual rankings,” shared Patient Experience Supervisor, Amanda Picioccio, during a recent patient experience panel discussion. “Our approach focuses on Gonzaba as a cohesive unit, not pitting providers against each other.” If internal benchmarks consistently trend low, consider developing internal competitions with rewards for meeting or exceeding goals.
Turning Patient Feedback into Growth Opportunities
Organizations that don’t take the time to collect, analyze, and monitor patient experience data forgo opportunities to edge out competitors, attract more patients, and drive continued growth.
While every piece of feedback might not be a glowing testimonial, each is certainly an opportunity to learn and improve. Lending an ear to your patients’ concerns serves as a testament to your exceptional quality of care, fostering trust in your brand and motivating prospective patients to choose your organization.