Every healthcare facility wants nothing more than to build good relationships with its patients. After all, having good relationships with patients will only bring positive outcomes, such as increasing patient loyalty and social advocacy. Providing a positive patient experience is one way for healthcare facilities to build good relationships with patients.
Patient experience, as explained by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, “encompasses the range of interactions that patients have with the healthcare system, including their care from health plans, and from doctors, nurses, and staff in hospitals, physician practices, and other healthcare facilities.” Patient experience, therefore, reveals more than the overall satisfaction of patients. By proactively asking patients for feedback on their experience through surveys, healthcare facilities will know what actually happens during patients’ visits; what has gone smoothly as well as the issues patients have possibly encountered. That information will help healthcare facilities identify areas of improvement so that they can develop practical strategies to deliver first-class treatment to all patients and visitors.
4 Steps Healthcare Facilities Should Do to Improve Patient Experience
If you wish to measure and improve your healthcare facility’s patient experience, follow these steps.
1. Build an effective survey
The first step is to prepare the survey well. If you want to build an effective survey, you need to pay attention to the format of the survey and the list of questions. Choose the format of the survey that you think is the most suitable for your company’s needs.
Next, while compiling the list of questions, make sure the questions you ask in the surveys focus on one subject; in this case, patient experience. Therefore, all the questions should be related to the patients’ journey from the beginning to the end, such as the quality of the service or treatment provided, the quality of the equipment and facilities, how quickly staff responded, how accurate and useful the information provided, etc.
2. Distribute the survey to patients and collect their feedback
After building the survey, the next step is to distribute the survey to patients and visitors for them to fill in. You can distribute the survey via email, SMS, or even at the location right after they receive their services or treatments. Bear in mind that asking patients or visitors to fill in surveys can be quite challenging. Although for some people being asked for their input would make them feel appreciated and heard, for others being asked for their honest opinion may be a burden. For various possible reasons, there are people who are reluctant to fill in surveys.
With the right approaches, however, you can persuade more patients and visitors to give you their input. Therefore, you will have more data so that you can measure patient experience more accurately.
3. Process and analyse data
At this point, you would receive survey responses from patients and visitors; but, sadly, the survey responds you collect are raw data. Please be aware that raw data needs to be processed and transformed into outputs that are comprehensible, practical, and measurable before you can proceed further.
With a proper customer feedback management system, you can automatize this step and the system will transform a jumble of raw data into an easy-to-understand graphical representation for you.
4. Acting on feedback
Now that those raw data have been transformed into easy-to-understand outputs, healthcare facilities should act upon it. Do not let those data go to waste. Use what you have collected to make a strategic plan, set achievable goals and objectives, as well as implement changes so that you can improve the patient experience.
If you want to improve patient experience at your healthcare facility by using feedback surveys, you should consider implementing SMARTSURVEYS™, a customer feedback platform that will seamlessly collect patient feedback across all settings and service lines. With our cutting-edge customer feedback platform, each survey is customisable to fulfil each healthcare facility’s specific needs. Furthermore, SMARTSURVEYS™’s beneficial features will help healthcare facilities engage and interact with their patients on a more personal level. Therefore, with the help of an advanced customer feedback management solution like SMARTSURVEYS™, improving the patient experience through feedback surveys will be simple and efficient.
To learn more about SMARTSURVEYS™, visit our website or reach us at info@bss.com.au.
