No one understands healthcare better than patients. They are the ones who experience it first hand and can provide invaluable feedback for major improvements. In this article we explore the importance of patient feedback for the healthcare sector specifically when it comes to implementing a patient feedback program.
Why measure patient feedback?
Measuring patient feedback has many benefits. Not only does it provide valuable information about patient satisfaction, but it can also support quality improvements and promote continuous development initiatives in healthcare organizations.
Collecting regular feedback on patient care can help to ensure that services meet the needs of patients and staff, are in line with ISO requirements, and support you in identifying areas that need to be adjusted or improved. What’s more, when patients are engaged in improving services and sharing their experience with others, it can help improve trust in the healthcare system overall.
How patient surveys can help
Patient surveys help to identify areas where patients may be having difficulty accessing care or where they feel that their treatment is not meeting their needs. They can even lead to identifying training needs for healthcare professionals. The top two reasons why patients decide to switch their healthcare providers are, in fact, lack of medical care access due to bad time management and communication skills. These types of issues can be prevented before they occur if medical organizations took the opportunity to discover what they could do better by understanding the reasons behind their patient’s unsatisfaction.
The hidden knowledge provided by patient surveys
One might be surprised by how much invaluable knowledge patient surveys can provide. For instance, not all feedback concerns medical procedures or staff themselves. It turns out that even the general conditions of the doctor’s office or the waiting room influence how a patient might feel about their provider. Whether the waiting room has enough seating, proper heating and water available to patients will affect whether they would use the same medical provider in the future. This means that even the smallest of adjustments can affect the quality of your patient care, and patient surveys will help you to identify these core focus points.
According to McKinsey, collecting feedback on patient satisfaction via patient feedback program is vital to the improvement and maintenance of a healthcare system. It is a known fact that the essential first step in improving any organization is feedback, but that is not possible without having a well-designed feedback solution in place.
The healthcare industry specifically is constantly evolving and adapting to new technologies. That evolution should also include feedback. To keep up with the competition, hospitals and clinics need to rely on digital feedback solutions in order to improve patient care.
Digital feedback solutions as key
Digitalized feedback solutions provide secure channels for patients to provide feedback anonymously and accurately about their experiences, while allowing the healthcare provider to view and analyse the results. Understanding what patients want from healthcare is very important for improving outcomes and reducing hospital readmissions.
Digital feedback solutions offering patient surveys and questionnaires allow healthcare providers to collect patient data in a secure, anonymous, GDPR-compliant manner. The information is then used to both improve and track progress and measure the success of the improvement efforts.
Manage your online reputation for patient feedback
And finally, there is another advantage: today, more and more opinions are being formed in evaluation portals on the internet, even for healthcare facilities. Institutions that collect feedback in advance are in control here: for example, by reacting quickly to points of criticism, you can mitigate or avoid negative impulse evaluations in these portals. This means that collecting patient feedback also becomes part of the reputation management of hospitals and medical facilities.
If you want to find out more about the possibilities of digital transformation, patient feedback programs and the impact on your patient experience, you can reach us at any time via this contact form or start your free Netigate trial today!
