Patient Feedback: Receive, Organize, Strategize and Make it Work Best for You

‘If you want quality to be the soul of everything in your healthcare unit, you must understand from a patient’s perspective.’ 

If you are a hospitality healthcare organization, you need to measure how patients experience treatment and care. Taking patient inputs helps you highlight areas that need improvement so that patient-oriented and patient-led service in your domain can be provided. There are patient feedback software, surveys, and audits that help healthcare organizations involve their staff, patients and people translate patient feedback to relatable improvements.  

Things Patients want 

Before you get about building or improving your healthcare unit, extensive work on identifying what patients really want and need is of paramount significance. Some of these necessities are: 

• Quick and reliable access to health advice 
• Trusted healthcare professionals providing effective treatment 
• Clear, precise, and comprehensive information plus self-care support 
• Attention towards environmental and physical needs 

• Respect, emotional support, and empathy  
• Providing support and involvement related advice for the carers and family 
• Continuing post-care support plus smooth transitions 

Now that we have walked the first lap of patient needs and things they want, the ideal way would be to understand how to gather inputs from the patients and their families. Taking inputs on how the patients felt, what areas need improvement, what went bad, and most importantly – if they will come back to your hospital/clinic and refer you to their friends and family is vital.

The million-dollar thought for you to chew on is – how would you meet the challenges of bettering your healthcare services?  

Well, the first step would be to find out exactly what service users and patients think by seeking their experiences. Scrutinizing feedback would provide a direct insight about what exactly is working fine and what is not in the ways your organization delivers care.  

Patients feedback – who it impacts and how 

Within the bad and the good of your patients’ feedback, if you are able to find gems, it would make it easier to adjust, adapt and accommodate the patient experience in time. In simple words, feedback is how you keep your system at the heart and soul of whatever you do.  

Before you embark on the feedback collection process from patients, you need to identify why you are in the mode of seeking inputs. Identifying the outcomes you desire and then making a precise outline of the process to get there enables you to set the groundwork for an investment that is worthwhile for both you and your patients’ time.  

Patient survey/feedback serves the following functions in your healthcare unit:  

• Administration and governance facility 
• Technical and physical departments that help your protected health information (PHI) 
• To enhance the performance of your healthcare facility like physicians, nursing unit, etc 

Methods to Get Patient Feedback 

Several effective patient feedback methods exist. Let’s go through six of these: 

Before embarking on the reason behind collecting patient feedback, we need to know why you would seek patient input. You may wonder when there is so much patient information already in records, why bother about adding more in terms of patient feedback, etc. Well, one of the reasons is that patient feedback makes sure your organization doesn’t stay far from your needs.  

Feedback surveys of patients 

Developing one useful customer survey could be highly challenging. You could ask customers umpteen numbers questions, however, specificity and brevity help you keep your patients attentive towards the questionnaire. You could pick between short surveys that help in targeting specific issues or the longer and traditional ones.  

Also, if you want your customers to remain hooked and complete a survey, ensure you follow certain simple practices: 

• Ask questions that are aligned specifically to your goals. 
• Ask open-ended questions. 
• Create rating scales that are consistent. 
• Better not to load with questions or ask leading questions. 

Patient and email contact forms 

The email could be the easiest method towards gathering candid feedback from your patients. These are support channels for most organizations. However, to get maximum feedback or revert from patients, you may do the following three things:  

• Set absolutely clear expectations 
• Organize proper email feedback  
• Send personalized responses 

Usability testing to bring out deeper insights 

Usability testing that brings out deeper insights about your hospital requires highly upfront planning. Having a clear strategy would help you realize the challenges customers don’t understand they are facing and hence come up with actionable insights that would make their experiences much better.  

Patient interviews that are exploratory 

If you seek direct outreach, you are 90 percent guaranteed to receive beneficial feedback from your patients. Qualitative stories that you receive from your customers add better impetus to this feedback. Reaching out to the patients directly opens those conversations that are otherwise not possible.  

While collecting feedback from patients, the following three tips are helpful: 

• Start with open-ended two-way dialogue 
• Get specific while you are moving forward 
• Be active listener 

Social Media 

There are several untapped candid feedback from your patients you could get access to with social listening. Direct social networks or comments aren’t just the sole way to collect patient feedback, there are several built-in polling tools in many networks that could be used. 

Analytics-based on-site activity 

Analytics is the new gateway to understand what your patient is asking for even before the patient understands. This mode could serve you to help your patients go through advanced and seamless treatment and post-recovery consultations.  

Software, apps, and methods to organize patient feedback 

As there is a requirement for patient feedback to better the quality of service and function at hospitals and clinics, there is also an increasing need for patient feedback software. Several functions have been created within these apps to provide seamless functioning of your organization. Some are cited below:  

# Governance and administration facility 

Feedback collected from all your patients helps the admin group to create a better understanding of their needs. Gain control plus visibility on your healthcare data first by creating centralized patient feedback data and then use global settings so that benchmarks can be achieved.  

# Enables Security Compliance for PHI 

With advanced security compliant features in your hospital feedback software, you will be able to maintain the right kind of administrative, technical, and physical safeguards so that security for PHI could be continued.  Your organization’s patient data is also secure with the software enabling you to avoid breach risk.  

# Spread Data across Workgroups with Transparency While Promoting Good Collaboration 

When you want to float your patient feedback data across workgroups, you can do it while ensuring transparency of your feedback inputs. Enjoy multiple features like managing user access to your data, easily setting roles, and giving permission to promote good collaboration.  

# Support Requirements throughout Your Organization 

You could support requirements throughout your organization, right from employee to patient feedback. Collecting data makes it easy across functions to branch, piping, and provide multilingual support within your organization.  

The usefulness of the entire process 

Patients may provide 5-stars or even highly positive reviews on your service, yet digging deep into understanding what motivates them to give such feedback will give you additional insights. A system of patient feedback in place that is way beyond online feedback can give you additional information about each episode of care, gather the reasons as to why the feedback was positive, negative, or neutral, and enable you to identify trends.  With the help of the feedback received either online or on your system, or via social media referrals – about how the doctors or the staff treated the patients could help enhance your reputation management. The process also helps boost patient engagement and prevent patient leakage. Enhance your performance and prevent patient churn, plus engage your patients in a health treatment system by understanding what they need. Leverage your hospital feedback software and serve your purpose best.