Patient feedback is an important component of quality improvement for a medical practice. The overall patient experience is crucial not only to the practice but also to your patients' health. Patients can be dissatisfied for myriad reasons, such as poor communication, inefficient billing practices, long wait times and a negative atmosphere, all of which affect return visits, word-of-mouth referrals and, ultimately, reimbursement.
In a perfect world, patients would fill out satisfaction surveys, and the practice would take the information it needs from those surveys and then implement changes to address their customers' concerns. However, in the real world, collecting helpful, actionable patient feedback is difficult.
Why Collect Patient Feedback?
The purpose of obtaining patient feedback is to solicit impressions about various aspects of the patient experience so the business can determine how to improve it. Some customers will decline to participate for fear that their answers will not be confidential or because they are too busy, but some will be eager to fill out the survey, for both good and bad reasons.
It may be useful to collect several rounds of feedback. The first surveys should be more general, centering around communication, wait times, billing and the office environment. Follow-up surveys can then drill down to further pinpoint the areas of concern. Once a plan for improvement is made and implemented, surveys can be used again to determine whether the patients have seen the intended changes in the business.
Methods for Obtaining Patient Feedback
While no one specific method will work for every gynecology practice, the following initiatives are good places to start. All three are inexpensive and can be performed by existing staff members.
- Patient shadowing: Have a staff member shadow a certain number of patients (with their permission) through their entire visit. The employee can experience potential issues firsthand and deal directly with the patients.
- Interviewing patients directly: Ask a number of patients to participate in a structured interview. Have an employee ask a specific set of questions and write down everything the patient says. Over the course of multiple interviews, patients are likely to bring up the same problems.
- Post-visit surveys: Tell every patient at the end of the visit that the office wants to hear from her. Offer a survey and provide more than one option, such as a digital tablet in the office or an email link, for completing it. Patients who are less tech-savvy might prefer to be handed a self-addressed, stamped envelope containing a blank survey that they can complete and return at their convenience.
Knowing What Questions to Ask
Seek out proven, validated surveys that are available online. Organizations such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) offer suggestions and tools for obtaining meaningful patient feedback. Existing surveys can always be modified to fit a particular business.
Generally, a survey should take five to 10 minutes to complete and include no more than 10 questions. The longer it is, the fewer respondents will actually complete it. This also means that the questions at the bottom of the survey may go unanswered.
Patients are loyal to their doctors if they like them. For gynecologists, it is critical to establish long-lasting, meaningful doctor-patient relationships. Problems within the practice itself can mar these relationships and drive patients to seek out other providers. Loyal customers will be willing to offer you their insight, but only if you ask them for it.
