A patient’s experience is vital for the future success of medical practices. And being aware level of satisfaction of the patients to your practice is critical.
While the term patient satisfaction can sound intimidating, it is ultimately a subjective metric to gauge whether a patient’s expectations were met during a healthcare encounter. Measuring patient satisfaction is the first step to making improvements. After all, you need to understand where things might be going wrong in order to fix them. Instead of speculating as to why patients were dissatisfied with their healthcare encounter, why not ask them directly?
Patient satisfaction surveys are excellent tools to gather useful and actionable information from patients about specific areas in need of improvement. Measuring and improving patient satisfaction is an ongoing and constructive practice that will enable medical practices to provide the best healthcare experience possible. Throughout the healthcare industry, providing patient satisfaction surveys is a common way for medical practices of any specialty to discover ways to better serve their patient base.
If you’re considering conducting a patient satisfaction survey, you need to ensure your survey is equipped to provide helpful patient feedback. Knowing the best questions to include in your survey is an important step in the process. Here are some examples of the top patient satisfaction survey questions to include and why they are important.
Remember, it is important to make sure your survey questions are in line with your facility’s goals—such as providing accessible patient care, paint management, understanding new care delivery models, reporting on MIPS measures, etc.
By considering the patient’s journey, you can kick off your survey at the very beginning – when they schedule an appointment. This way, valuable insights can be gained into their overall experience from start to finish.
A top concern for many healthcare providers is accessibility. Scheduling an appointment should not be a hassle or time consuming for patients. If you consistently receive poor ratings, it is likely you need to reassess your scheduling processes and staffing needs.
Finding the correct facility, accessibility of parking, and ease of understanding patient check-in procedures are all critical to a patient’s overall experience. If a patient is stressed or wastes a lot of time trying to find the right location, fighting to find a parking spot, or is confused about where to go and what to do upon arrival, their satisfaction level plummets.
Improving the ease of navigating your facility not only improves patients’ satisfaction, but also reduces late or missed appointments, and speeds up delivery of care. Providing clear signage is essential for helping patients find their way around your facility.
Patient satisfaction scores tend to significantly drop with long wait times before being seen. It is important to show patients that their time is valuable. If patients are consistently waiting to be seen more than 20 minutes past their appointment time, your facility may need to investigate issues of inefficiencies or lack of proper staffing.
A patient may have had an amazing experience thus far in their patient journey, but if they don’t have a good experience with their primary provider, it is unlikely they will be back. It is important that healthcare providers are respectful, courteous, trustworthy, patient, and knowledgeable.
A common complaint is that patients feel like a task, something to be checked off a list, instead of a person with real health concerns and human emotions. It is important that providers spend an appropriate amount of time addressing patient concerns and answering any questions the patient may have.
This question is also referred to as the Net Promotor Score, or NPS, and is a score to measure customer loyalty. Measuring NPS has become a standard across industries, including healthcare.
Of course, any practice would prefer loyal patients. However, carefully listening to unhappy patients can be crucial to evaluating your practice’s strategies and operations that directly impact patients.
ClearSurvey is a best-in-class survey system focused on helping medical practices offer the best patient satisfaction in healthcare. We can help you develop a custom survey question-set based on your goals so you can gather data for useful insights. Learn more about how ClearSurvey can elevate your practice or schedule a demo today!
Patient satisfaction and healthcare outcomes goes hand in hand. Learn more about the unique relationship between provider and patient and how patient satisfaction surveys can help your practice achieve its goals.
Patient satisfaction and healthcare outcomes goes hand in hand. Learn more about the unique relationship between provider and patient and how patient satisfaction surveys can help your practice achieve its goals.
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