Are you using patient satisfaction surveys to evaluate the quality of your services, or are you still a survey skeptic? Are you not sure that the patient feedback app will be effective or reliable for you? Do you feel like they are too time-consuming? The truth is that patient surveys are essential for every healthcare facility—regardless of your specialty.
Measuring quality and outcome in healthcare is a challenging task. Patients, doctors, anesthetic assistants, nurses, and managers will have a different perspective on “quality.”
Importance of Patient Satisfaction Surveys:
Patient Feedback Apps are gaining huge importance and should be at the top priority of any healthcare facility. It’s valuable to get insights into what patients think about the care and treatment they receive. These insights will lead to smart decisions on how to improve healthcare, patient happiness, and the better services offered by doctors and nurses.
Steps to Create Patient Satisfaction Surveys:
Patient satisfaction surveys can provide you insight into exactly whether your services are doing well, and what all you can do to make it better. Asking your patients for feedback can improve the quality and make patients feel heard and understood. Studies show that patient survey software is useful in improving the overall efficiency which will result increase in the revenue of healthcare services.
“According to the MGMA (Medical Group Management Association), approximately 80% of the highest-performing medical practices make use of patient satisfaction surveys.”
Step 1: Identify the problematic areas
It’s always recommended to identify potential problems in your practice before creating a patient satisfaction survey. It can be related to patient wait times, accessing healthcare information at the proper time, and a lot more. It’s always recommended to team up with hospital staff and share insights on how the overall service can be improved.
- The first step is to ensure that your survey consists of relevant questions that are solvable. Asking a broad question about satisfaction (“How pleased are you with our services?”) doesn’t provide you actionable feedback. Instead, ask questions about specific areas related to the patient experience, like “How satisfied are you with the wait time to see a doctor?”
- The results of every survey, good or bad, should be addressed to fix your patients’ issues. The workflow can be modified to shorten wait times or making a user-friendly website.
Step 2: Create your survey
Designing a patient satisfaction survey or questionnaire consists of much more than just choosing what questions to ask. Some of the few tips to keep in mind when you design your survey:
- Ask less than 10 questions: It’s always recommended to keep a survey as short as possible. Nobody wants to spend more than 2-3 minutes to complete a survey.
- Focus on the key areas of interest like treatment, staff, facility, communication, etc. to streamline the survey and increase completion rates.
- It is helpful to design the survey questions in the same flow as the patient would have experienced their visit. For example, you can ask about how the patient found out about your clinic.
- Use ratings to improve data and analysis: A rating set could be on a scale of 1-5 where 5 denotes very satisfied, and 1 denotes being not at all satisfied.
- Using the rating method allows patients to rate their satisfaction with their experience and helps to provide consistency across patient responses.
- It also avoids tying the ratings to emotion (i.e., happy v. unhappy). Emotions are more subjective and less accurate in assessing the clinic’s performance.
- Include an open-ended question: These types of questions are designed to extract more information and ask people to provide answers in the descriptive format.
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- Writing a precise open-ended question is a daunting task. It should give respondents the freedom to share important insights.
- A lot of crucial information can be collected through multiple choice questions or drop-down questions, in which surveyors select the answer that most closely aligns with their own from a set of options.
Step 3: Design and Launch
After the selection of the type of questions, it’s time to design and launch your survey. The right patient survey app will make it easy to launch well-designed surveys in less than 10 minutes. After designing your survey, choose how to distribute it. For patient satisfaction surveys, it’s best to distribute them on various channels like email, real-time using the android survey app, iPad survey app, and kiosk survey app, SMS, online with the help of an online survey tool.
- Use a survey tool: There are plenty of great patient feedback tools that you can use to reduce your efforts in creating and managing the survey.
- With Zonka Feedback’s patient satisfaction surveys, healthcare providers can find out what patients think about their most recent visit.
- Get real-time patient insights related to the quality services, staff communication which can help in increasing patient satisfaction.
- Make use of patient surveys to compare answers, or use the information to make sure you are on the right track for the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) program.
Questions to Ask in a Patient Satisfaction Survey
The best survey will consist of questions that cover the entire patient experience starting from booking an appointment to the discharge process.
Top 10 questions to ask in a Patient Satisfaction Survey
- Would you suggest our hospital to a family member or friend?
- What could we have done additionally to do better?
- Was the process was easy to schedule an appointment?
- Were you satisfied with the in-patient procedure?
- Were doctors came on time?
- How satisfied are you with the cleanliness of our hospital?
- How would you rate the professionalism of our staff?
- How comfortable you were while talking to the doctors?
- Were your financial obligations explained to you?
- On a scale of 1-10, rate the friendliness of the care provider.
Patient Satisfaction is used to evaluate quality care and ensure better patient outcomes. It has become a major section of value-based care. Apart from being a powerful reporting measure, patient satisfaction surveys give you valuable data on how to enhance your overall patient experience.
