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Patient satisfaction is the key to a great experience
Patient satisfaction is more important than ever in today’s healthcare landscape.
With healthcare consumerism on the rise, it’s becoming crucial for hospitals to focus on providing a positive experience for patients. Face it, you want discharged patients to report they had a great care experience at your hospital. This can seem like a daunting task, given the challenges many organizations are currently facing with the pandemic: loss of experienced team members, clinical burnout, staff safety concerns and changes to CMS rules for value-based programs. However, improving patient satisfaction is essential to boost revenue growth and reduce operational costs. By focusing on the patient experience, hospitals can decrease penalties, improve staff security and gain ground in a competitive landscape. That’s why health systems and clinics are looking at integration platforms that automate patient satisfaction monitoring to create great experiences for patients and staff alike.
Why patient satisfaction is so important
When patients are satisfied with their care, they feel empowered and that they have some control over their care. The patient experience is critical because it’s an important indicator of how engaged and motivated patients are. Since satisfaction reporting has a direct impact on your bottom line, focusing on quality service is a guide for improvement. Higher satisfaction rates and a positive experience lead to better patient compliance, which can in turn reduce readmissions and operating costs. Most importantly, investing in patient satisfaction builds trust in your organization, leading to higher referral rates and repeat visits for care.
Meeting patients where they are
- Are we adequately addressing accessibility, inclusion and health equity?
- Are doctors and nurses approachable and responsive?
- What expectations are we setting at Admittance?
- Do patients feel they’re given appropriate time and attention with the Care Team?
- Are procedures and medical processes adequately explained?
- What patient engagement initiatives do we offer that create a better patient experience?
- Do patients trust they’re getting the right care?
- Are service requests met accurately and in a timely manner?
- Are the patient education materials we’re providing relevant and meaningful?
- Are we sharing patient satisfaction results with the public to build a reputation for exceptional care?
Supporting caregivers and staff
Your teams play a big role in how patients perceive their care experience. Supporting staff in the patient experience process helps them feel appreciated and connected.
- Ask for staff input on processes and technology systems.
- Publicly acknowledge great service and stellar care.
- Invest in continuing education and top-of-license performance.
- Invest in technology that makes caregivers more efficient and re-examine redundant systems.
- Support individual success with individualized onboarding.
- Encourage stress relief with programs and activities that give team members a chance to maintain good mental health and activities to blow off some steam.
- Work closely with EVS teams on cleanliness initiatives to ensure safety across the ecosystem and keep staff safe.
The survey as a measurement tool for patient satisfaction
It’s important to give patients an outlet for expressing their opinion on the quality of service they receive. When your patient engagement system offers custom survey capabilities, then you can send surveys via a simple patient portal. Making surveys accessible and easy to use is important for a positive response. Further, configuration gives you a variety of ways to create baseline reporting, so you can quickly respond to feedback. One way to do that is by automating survey distribution to highlight opportunities for service improvement. It’s important to incorporate survey data and auto-generated survey results as guideposts for planning resource needs and future expansion.
Technology support
Sara Heath, writing for EHR Intelligence, notes that, “Most experts agree that having detailed insights into the patient experience, usually collected via patient experience surveying, is the best bet for getting to that practice improvement. That survey data can help an organization pinpoint key patient pain points and understand which stakeholders will be important in implementing practice improvement.”
With touch-enabled digital whiteboards and patient TVs, completing a survey is as easy as the swipe of a screen or a click of a button. That way, patients with any level of technology ability can easily answer a survey. And with an integrated patient engagement platform, if a patient doesn’t have a positive experience, then the same technology helps the care team receive immediate feedback and review results. In turn, health systems can determine how they can shift to meet patient expectations.
The last word
It’s evident that patient satisfaction should be a top priority for any healthcare organization. By monitoring and understanding the patient experience, organizations can make data-driven decisions to improve the quality of care they provide. Implementing data management tools improves processes and provides quantifiable metrics to meet planning goals. By reviewing patient feedback, you’re putting a focus on what’s really important, and that’s providing outstanding care that helps patients be their healthiest selves – which has a positive impact on the bottom line.