In business, understanding your target audience is very important as it determines your corporate values and even your business performance.
However, in healthcare, things are a bit different. The information your team has will ensure that you can provide optimal healthcare to your patients. Having the correct patient feedback will ensure that you don’t make mistakes from the past.
Now comes the intention you have to improve your business as a whole and achieve greater efficiency in what you do. The right information you need in order to start making these changes can sometimes come from patient feedback surveys.
So, now let’s discuss some of the most common survey types and try to find out ways to help improve your healthcare organization.
Healthcare Assessment Surveys
This type of patient survey assesses risk factors in one’s lifestyle and gives you a thought of your health care responsibility and limits.
While there are a ton of unpredictable factors when it comes to health, the truth is that this type of healthcare assessment is something that’s used by more than just insurance companies. When checking each patient, it’s important that you know what you’re up against.
For a lot of healthcare-related organizations like hospitals, a health risk assessment survey can be used to set suitable costs. In certain situations, self-detailed information can be utilized in a few ways. It’s not just about price. Sometimes, substantial reports can drastically improve the quality of healthcare that you can provide to your patients.
Sure, today you will have an easy time gathering biometric information, but unfortunately, you won’t be able to see everything in this biometric data. There are situations where you’ll have to depend on your patients’ willingness to share personal information of their own volition.
Using Data to Craft SOP
A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a course of action that your medical staff must follow in order to reach its optimal objective. There are numerous benefits of SOP with regards to streamlining the course of your practice and guaranteeing that you address each significant issue that surfaces in these topics.
The most important thing is that this is not just about handling this large number of issues yet handling them in the most potentially effective way. What you are trying to do is maintain consistency across the board, and reduce the possibility of error, as well as the onboarding time of your employees.
There are a couple of other logical issues that can help out. For example, it permits you to lay out an unmistakable level of leadership. This can be a bit confusing in healthcare, seeing how managerial staff at the management level and staff at the medical level seemingly belong to two separate branches.
Remote Health Monitoring Survey Check-ins
Dealing with one’s health is a long-term thing, and thus remote health monitoring is an important matter.
To conduct this survey, however, one requires some specific tools and devices to reach optimal efficiency. You will need a glucometer, pulse oximeter, thermometer, and scale.
In today’s digital world, you will find innovative options for all of these tools, and through the Internet of Things (IoT), reporting can happen in real-time.
The most important thing is that all of these reports will go to the same database (patient’s chart). And with the help of intelligent information management (IIM) system, you can get reliable on-demand access. This will show how reliant your healthcare organization is on the latest digital trends.
Patient Satisfaction Surveys
Although you are running a hospital, at the end of the day, you are running a business, and your patients are your customers. This clearly means that patient satisfaction might determine your patient retention, patient return rate, as well as patient loyalty ratio.
Patients, for sure, are biased and may not understand how a healthcare organization runs, but they need to know what your practice looks like from the outside.
Patient satisfaction is all related to your staff and their performance/behavior. This is actually a great thing; it will provide you with actionable information on what improvements you must make in order to give your performance a sizable boost. Further, it will also help you to evaluate your business performance in a more accurate manner.
The reliability of your patient satisfaction survey often depends on the quality of your questions. Nonetheless, there are a great deal of variables that you will have to take into account while formulating these questions. Some of these factors include:
- Quality of medical care
- Communication and Interpersonal skills of your medical staff
- Financial aspects of care
- Accessibility of care
- Transparency & communication
Out of the above-mentioned things, the “quality of medical care” may be the most controversial thing. You see, your patients may not be able to accurately access the quality of medical care that they have received. Still, their perception of the quality of medical care is very important.
You need to just keep in mind that putting these factors into words may not be an easier thing, which you might be thinking.
While this might not be a 1:1 translatable, you can even look at the way other industries are handling these survey inquiries for motivation.
Post-Release Surveys
Post-discharge follow-up is like a post-sale follow-up with a lot of major differences. It is an outreach performed by trained medical staff or professionals, which means that it has to be further customized and this feedback should be taken very seriously.
No, many healthcare organizations simply cannot afford to conduct such a follow-up from each and every patient, which now and again brings about poor clinical results.
The fundamental explanation for this lies in the way that these medical services associations deny to use technology to its fullest potential. Present-day systems and outreach methods can be fully customized and adjusted to healthcare so that they provide a unique centralized approach.
In other industries, customers returning within 30 days would be a good thing, but here things are quite the opposite. Your inability to solve your patients’ medical problems for good will be seen as a major inaptitude on your part. Moreover, in a few cases, it might prompt a grievous result.
Conducting these post-release surveys all the more productively can help you avoid his problem for good.
Benefits of Patient Health Surveys
For the past 20 years, the practice of using patient satisfaction survey software or patient feedback software has gained huge attention as an important and worthwhile source of information to identify inconsistencies and gaps in quality patient care.
This has enabled healthcare organizations to develop effective action plans to make needed improvements.
A well-designed survey tool you implement in your practice will not only allow you to gather critical patient feedback but will also improve communication between your healthcare team and your patients.
Collect Information
Health surveys help you collect information that you may not be able to find in doctor/patient conversations or on lab tests. Although your patients may feel hesitant to offer direct in-person feedback, anonymous surveys provide them with a way to do so privately.
Point Out Weakness
With health survey software, you will be able to identify weaknesses in the patient’s experience like long check-in processes and waiting times. Whenever you have recognized these shortcomings, you can take the necessary steps to address them accordingly.
Conclusion
Finally, healthcare surveys are a great tool for healthcare providers because they are extremely versatile. They can be used to access a healthcare provider’s performance across an almost infinite number of measures – mainly, it must be able to come up with insightful questions.
For many healthcare providers, conducting simple surveys to measure patient experience will be adequate. These surveys are unlikely to provide detailed insight into your performance but will help reveal those areas of service where there are chances of improvement.
