Navigating a Feedback System: How to Improve Patient Satisfaction Through Effective Patient Surveys?
Did you know that 68% of satisfied patients are likely to recommend their healthcare providers to others?
On the other side, dissatisfied patients are more likely to spread negative word-of-mouth and leave bad reviews online, which can significantly impact your business.
Patient satisfaction isn’t just another metric; it’s the heart of quality care and a crucial component of a successful healthcare organization.
Why Should Practices Monitor and Improve Patient Satisfaction Scores?
It’s true that patients nowadays prefer taking charge of their health and treatment courses. They want to be active in choosing the best for themselves and their families. With this, there is a rise in delivering patient-centered care which often decides the success of healthcare practices. However, many practices fail to evaluate whether their patients are satisfied with their experience or not and in most cases, they lose potential patients through harsh reviews.
So, if you want to maintain a thriving practice in this competitive market, it’s important to understand patient sentiments and consider improving patient satisfaction as a key goal for your organization.
How to Measure Patient Satisfaction?
Patient surveys are an effective tool for measuring patient satisfaction throughout their care journey. By curating questions relevant to your practice, you can capture patient responses and identify areas for improvement.
A patient survey can be sent at various touchpoints, each with its unique objective. Here are some examples of patient surveys you can use:
- Patient rating survey after an appointment
- Periodic patient satisfaction surveys
- Pre-op and post-op surveys
- Health risk assessment surveys
- Net promoter score surveys
Healthcare practices can choose to make the survey open to capture patient details. Anonymous surveys are also effective in collecting non-biased information about your services.
Best Practices to Measure Patient Satisfaction with Surveys:
Here are some best practices you can follow to capture feedback effectively:
- Set clear objectives: Identify specific goals you want to achieve with each survey to ensure the questions are relevant.
- Keep it concise: Most patients will not complete their surveys if they are overwhelmed with excessive questions. Create surveys that aren’t time-consuming for patients to fill.
- Use different question types: From multiple choice questions, open-ended questions, and ratings, use various question types to capture feedback.
- Create surveys for different appointment types: Rather than using generic questions for your entire patient population, tailor surveys to different types of appointments to get specific feedback.
- Identify appropriate time: Send a patient survey at an ideal time, i.e., after a visit. Also, be considerate about your patients’ schedules and avoid sending at odd times.
- Target specific segments: Segment your surveys based on location, provider, race, ethnicity, age, and gender to gather specific insights.
- Multiple distribution channels: Send survey links via email, SMS, or both to reach patients through their preferred method.
- Anonymous and non-anonymous surveys: Offer both options to encourage honest feedback.
- Analyze and identify trends: Capture patient feedback and analyze trends to identify areas of improvement.
Manual Process Vs. Automated Patient Survey Tools
While some practices choose to distribute surveys manually using paper forms, there are many who rely on automated patients survey tools.
So, which is more effective? Let’s compare the two methods:
Manual surveys:
With the manual process, the staff creates the survey, prints or emails the surveys, and analyzes responses manually.
Automated patient survey tool:
With an automated tool, the staff can create a survey in the system. The platform sends the surveys automatically based on the preferred frequency and analyzes the data to present an automated report.
It’s clear that the manual process is heavy on both time and effort. And when faced with staffing challenges, this approach becomes more challenging.
Here are some of the advantages of choosing an automated patient survey tool:
- Easy to scale: The staff can send out surveys to a large patient population without putting in hours of manual effort.
- Timely: Most cases, when the staff sends a survey manually, it is difficult to maintain a strict timeline. And when surveys are sent late, patients may not be able to recollect their experience and provide inaccurate or incomplete response. With an automated tool, you can set up schedules that send out surveys at the right time.
- Accurate: An automated tool eliminates chances of human error, making it easier for you to capture accurate information.
Improving Patient Responses with an Automated Patient Survey Platform
CheckinAsyst’s automated, customizable patient satisfaction surveys offer an easy, convenient digital solution for your practice and patients. The solution can help capture timely, critical insights to gauge intake experiences, quantify patient satisfaction, and identify areas for improvement. The flexible platform supports various objectives, including CAHPS surveys, allowing you to set up tailored surveys to effectively manage your practice’s reputation, with minimal staff effort.
Take a look at one of our customers, Premier Surgical Associates. Previously, the clinic used to send out surveys manually which took hours of the staff’s time. And when the surveys went out late, the response rate was poor.
After switching to CheckinAsyst, the practice saw a 5x increase in survey responses.
And what’s more, they embedded their Google page in the survey to persuade patients to leave a review. This led to a 2x increase in positive Google reviews.
Ready to effectively measure patient satisfaction scores? Explore how your practice can benefit from an automated platform to enhance patient satisfaction, build loyalty, improve staff performance, and attract new patients.
