Patient Satisfaction Data: Healthcare Improvement Goldmine

There are no shortage of improvement projects to be done, but how do you know which ones are the most important? Ask your patients.

Health care is becoming increasingly competitive every day. Providers are trying to steal market share as overall volumes decrease. As any good business course will tell you, it is far easier and cheaper to retain customers than to obtain new ones. So how do you retain patients? One way is to keep them and their visitors happy.

Patient surveys can be immensely valuable in identifying trends or even uncovering unknown issues. Yet many organizations still have very separate patient satisfaction initiatives that rarely coordinate with improvement experts. Often patient satisfaction initiatives are led by a customer service department that doesn’t have the training or tools required to be successful.

Improvement experts and consultants can make a big impact on their organization’s performance and improve the efficiency of their customer service counterparts by incorporating patient satisfaction data in their opportunity analyses.

Doing so may reveal new or previously unknown issues before they become larger issues. Patients will tell you if that new check-out process designed to improve throughput is actually more difficult for them.

Patient satisfaction data will also help you prioritize projects. Why would you want to spend time and money shaving a few minutes off your billing process when your patients’ discharges are delayed 45 minutes because no wheelchairs can be found?

Some advice on using patient satisfaction data to identify improvement projects: Do identify trends, but don’t ignore comments. This experiential data is harder to mine, but is often better at identifying root causes. Categorize comments to speed up the process. Also, save money and increase response rates by using free web-based survey tools. Another source of experiential data is secret shoppers. These trained professinals pose as patients and record how they were treated as well as process issues.