As healthcare moves toward a patient-centered care model, eliciting patient feedback is increasingly vital. Seeking out and listening to patients’ experiences, needs, and perspectives – and subsequently making changes that respond to these – helps providers deliver on their promises of quality care while also creating a culture of open communication and continuous improvement. Eliciting patient feedback in public spaces such as online can also help bolster a practice’s reputation, encouraging new and repeat patients.
Common Areas Where Practices Can Improve
A recent literature review has highlighted several key areas of patient concern that healthcare providers can benefit from monitoring. These include:
- Patient communication – how well your providers explain conditions and care transitions. Arranging staff meetings to go over communication practices focusing on clarity, efficiency, personalization, and empathy can help.
- Care continuity and transitions – how well your practice handles discharge and follow-up care. Follow-up phone calls and communications, as well as personalized discharge letters, can help. Generating clinic-wide discharge folders to consolidate and share information can also be effective.
- Patient responsiveness – how providers, including nurses and doctors, interact with a patient. Being respectful, courteous, prompt, and understanding is essential. Proactive nursing rounds and rounds from leaders and senior staff can also help.
- Physical environment. The environment in which care is given. Hospitality-focused, hygienic spaces that are easy to access and navigate, which offer privacy and noise deadening, can improve the patient experience. COVID-19 protection measures are also currently something to be mindful of.
Using Patient Feedback to Improve Your Practice
Practices can solicit patient feedback in several ways and at various steps throughout the care process. Common points at which feedback can be sought are:
- At check-in. Ask patients if they’d be interested in providing feedback or a review when they check-in. Provide survey sheets or review links for them to fill out when they’re ready.
- At discharge. It’s not uncommon for practices to request a review (for example, on Google Maps or Yelp) or for patients to fill out a quick survey before they leave.
- Post appointment. A text message survey or email follow-up is a common way to request basic feedback and ratings of specific areas of their experience. Practices can ask for feedback or a review via social media channels.
When reviewing feedback, bear in mind that not all feedback is equally valuable. Unsolicited reviews tend to skew negatively, and surveys represent a brief snapshot and not necessarily the whole picture. Still, look for common themes, trends, and keywords and see where your clinic can improve. Some issues can be resolved as simply as with a clarifying phone call or extra visit, while others may be systemic and require interventions such as staff meetings, new benchmarks, and training, or a reimagining of your clinical space. Before making changes, assess the frequency of the feedback, its significance, and its cost and complexity to implement.
If your clinical environment is a common theme in patient feedback, talk to the team at Gittleson Zuppas Medical Realty. We can help you identify ways to address patient concerns by expanding, reimagining, or moving offices – improving feedback and bolstering your practice’s reputation.