Assess Patient Satisfaction
There are many factors that go into a patient's satisfaction or dissatisfaction with your services, and that means it can be difficult to assess. Use comprehensive yet concise surveys to analyze all aspects of patient care, including both medical and non-medical issues associated with the overall healthcare experience.
Contents
Steps
Setting Up the Assessment Process
- Understand the significance of assessment. Thorough medical knowledge and swift, accurate diagnoses are clearly important, but the well-being of patients relies on much more than merely that.
- Taking the time to assess patient satisfaction means improving the communication between physicians and the patients they treat.
- Surveys and similar assessment practices can make patients feel more listened to and cared for. This makes it easier for patients to trust their physicians and open up to medical staff about health issues.
- Patient satisfaction surveys also give medical practices an understanding of what they need to do to improve overall. This includes things like physical surroundings, timeliness of staff, duration of time taken to receive test results, waiting time, hand hygiene, friendliness of staff, etc.
- Approach the process with the right attitude. Conducting a patient satisfaction survey can be a good thing, but you need to make sure that everyone involved is interested in actively improving.
- Everyone involved with your medical practice must be brought on board. This includes those actively involved with patients (physicians, nurses, nursing assistants, other office staff) as well as those who run things behind the scenes.
- Quality work must be at the center of your practice's mission and vision.
- Keep in mind that patients have lots of choices when it comes to healthcare, so make sure that all of your staff members understand the importance of maintaining and enhancing patient satisfaction.
- Think about the cost. Determine how much you can afford to spend on this project before you embark on it. The rest of your decisions concerning the project will need to be based on that figure.
- Customer satisfaction surveys that are operated completely in-house are much more affordable in monetary terms, but they will require a greater time investment. Most large healthcare corporations hire large healthcare satisfaction companies to asses patient satisfaction. This allows for objective studies without any bias associated with the results.
- Conducting a survey through an outside vendor will save time, but it will cost you more money. Expect to pay at least $300 to $400 per physician if your practice has at least three physicians associated with it.
- You also need to consider the cost of analysis. If you are confident that someone in the practice has the time and skill to analyze the results quantitatively and accurately, you can save money by doing this in-house. If this isn't the case, though, you will need to outsource the analysis of results to a firm that specializes in the analysis of healthcare related data.
- Determine which tool to use. Written surveys are the most popular and, under most circumstances, the most accurate.
- Other options used can include phone surveys, focus groups, and personal interviews.
- The areas you assess will be the same regardless of the tool you decide on, even though the exact questions you might ask could vary between formats. The right choice mostly depends on cost and practicality for your specific circumstances.
- Keep everyone informed. Make sure that all of your staff and professional colleagues know what to expect from the survey.
- Explain your reasons for embarking on a patient satisfaction assessment. These may include improvement in performance, timeliness, physical aesthetics, reception staff impression. etc. Point out that patients deserve to have a say in provider performance. Also, mention that patients may comment on any aspect of care, from check-in to following up with test results. Also point out that it is important to be consistent with quality care and to ensure that everyone is following protocols, policies, and national guidelines.
- Also explain how the results will be evaluated and acted upon.
- This step will need to be done continually throughout the entire process. In other words, everyone involved should be kept updated from start to finish.
Designing Patient Satisfaction Surveys
- Keep the process anonymous. Patients will probably be more willing to answer a survey if they can do so anonymously.
- Moreover, anonymity also makes patients feel more comfortable with providing honest answers.
- Allow your patients to complete and return the survey privately.
- Do not require for names or identifying information. You can give the patients the option of doing so if they would like to discuss their comments or concerns further, but make sure that your patients understand that it is only optional and not required.
- Ask for demographic data. Ask patients to provide basic demographic data at the beginning or end of the survey. This information includes age, gender, and ethnicity.
- By collecting demographic data, you can determine how specific practices are meeting the needs of specific patient groups. You ultimately need to strive for satisfaction across all demographics.
- For instance, you may find that younger people are satisfied with your practice's reliance on email and texting to communicate appointment reminders, but older people are not. Your practice can then take steps to be sure that all people receive appointment reminders in a way that works best for them.
- Cover the three main issues. Overall, you need to ask questions that review matters of quality, access, and interpersonal interactions.
- Quality issues are the most straightforward. They include a patient's thoughts regarding the quality of your medical knowledge, diagnosis, and treatment.
- Access issues refer to the ease with which patients can make appointments, get referrals, or get treatment.
- Interpersonal issues could also be labeled as "bedside manner." Ask about how caring the physicians and other staff members appeared to be.
- Differentiate between satisfaction and experience. Patient satisfaction is subjective, but patient experience is more objective. You'll need to include both question types on the survey.
- Satisfaction questions focus on how well the patient's wishes are met. For instance, "How satisfied are you with the way your physician addressed your concerns?"
- Experience questions are phrased in a way that addresses what actually happened rather than how the patient felt about it. For example, "Did your physician ask you if you had any additional concerns before the appointment ended?"
- Ask a specific question about overall satisfaction. At the end of the survey, you need to come right out and ask, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your physician?"
- By asking this question, you can monitor the current status of patient satisfaction in general.
- You can also compare this question to the responses provided by other survey questions. Doing so will allow you to determine which aspects of the process your patients find most valuable.
- Phrase questions in a clear manner. Your questions should be specific and easy to understand.
- Avoid questions that require the patient to take too many factors into consideration. For example, a question like, "How friendly and informative was our staff?" would require a patient to consider too many elements, and some of those might exist. The friendliness of your receptionist might be great, but she might not be very informative. The nurse who attended the patient might be informative, but he might not be very friendly.
- Use an answer scale. Most of your questions will need to use an answer scale. Use the same answer scale for each question and explain the scale clearly to avoid any confusion.
- Five-point scales are the most commonly accepted. The answers to your questions will usually include either "Very Good, Good, Neutral, Bad, and Very Bad" or "Strongly Agree, Agree, No Opinion, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree."
- Answer scales can include anywhere from four to ten response levels, though.
- Include one or two open-ended questions. At the end of the survey, you should give your patients a chance to elaborate on concerns more extensively by asking a few open questions.
- The exact questions can vary, but it helps to ask one positive question and one negative question.
- A positive question would be something like, "What part of the experience are you most satisfied about?"
- A negative question would be something like, "Which areas do you think we need to improve in?"
- Keep it short and simple. The overall survey should be fairly brief to encourage a greater volume of responses. Aim for a survey in between one and three pages.
- Long surveys can seem intimidating or annoying, so patients are less likely to respond to them. Additionally, patients who do respond to them are less likely to consider each answer carefully.
Evaluating Survey Results
- Aim for statistical correctness. Before you can analyze the results of your survey, you need to analyze how accurate and reliable it is.
- For small practices, you should aim for about 200 patient responses. When dealing with a practice that has four or more physicians, aim for 50 responses per physician.
- Response rate is usually 30 to 35 percent for most written surveys. Keep that in mind when determining how many patient surveys to send out. Try to make sure that 30 percent of the total number you send will allow you to meet your minimum number of responses.
- Consider offering a small incentive for participation. For instance, you can send out your survey link via email to your patient list (be sure it is blind carbon-copied so that patient's privacy is not violated). Mention in the email that at the end of the survey period, one person will be drawn to receive a $50 gift card to a local restaurant, gas station, theater, or grocery store. Depending on your budget, you can include more opportunities to win an incentive, which increases participation.
- Score each response level separately. Instead of generalizing responses into broad "positive" and "negative" levels, you need to score each response level of your scoring scale separately.
- In other words, responses marked "very good" and "good" should be calculated separately. Don't categorize both as "satisfied."
- Analyzing the scores this way will provide greater precision.
- Divide questions into separate categories. More specifically, you should separate questions into the same content categories used when designing your questions: quality, access, and interpersonal issues.
- By analyzing the results in terms of broad categories like these, you can determine if there are certain strengths and weaknesses that need to be addressed and act accordingly based on that.
- For instance, your quality and access questions might score consistently well, but you may have poor overall interpersonal scores. In that case, you would need to enact changes to help improve the way medical and office staff interact with patients.
- Analyze each question separately. After analyzing broad categories, you need to look at each individual question and act accordingly.
- Start with the category you have the lowest patient satisfaction in and gradually work up to the category that boasts the greatest patient satisfaction.
- Specific questions can match or conflict with the overall results of the category they belong in. For example, patients might be generally unsatisfied with access issues, but they may still feel satisfied with how easy it is to obtain a referral from the doctor.
- Implement changes based on your results. Once you know which parts of your practice are satisfactory and which are not, you need to work on making changes to improve the areas that patients are generally unsatisfied with.
- Changes may need to occur to ensure that safety, cleanliness, and knowledge driven expertise are provided. These basics of patient care are essential to provide quality safe care.
- The key is to avoid placing blame and to look at things objectively. Work with the staff as a group and one-on-one to help each member of the practice improve as much as possible.
- If your patients are satisfied overall about nearly everything, you may not need to make many changes. Don't force change that isn't necessary. You simply need to pay attention to what your patients need and want. If you already provide it all, there's no need to change things now.
- Keep in mind that you may not be able to please all of your patients. Some patients will be difficult to please. All you can do is continue to make positive changes based on survey results and this should lead to higher patient satisfaction overall.
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