Everything you need to know about healthcare surveys
Learn how to use healthcare surveys to streamline healthcare experience data collection and improve patient care.
- Healthcare surveys are crucial for gathering insights to improve patient care, service quality, and public health outcomes.
- Surveys include patient satisfaction surveys and provider feedback surveys, each focusing on different aspects of healthcare.
- The best practices for conducting a healthcare survey include clear objectives, a well-designed questionnaire, representative sampling, confidentiality assurance, and thorough data analysis.
Collecting and acting on feedback is the key to improving your services in any industry. In the healthcare sector, surveys are a fantastic tool for rapidly gathering feedback that can be turned into action-based improvements across your organization.
Enhancing your patient experience begins with collecting feedback as efficiently as possible. Here’s everything you need to know about using surveys to improve your healthcare organization, from the patient to the employee experience.
Why healthcare surveys are important
The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally shifted both the healthcare worker and patient experience. According to SurveyMonkey research, 84% of healthcare professionals believe understanding the patient experience is more important than before the pandemic.
Healthcare surveys allow your business to collect feedback directly from your patients. By pinpointing touchpoints across the patient experience and listening to their reflections on them, you can better understand the experience you offer your patients.
Taking actionable steps based on the feedback you receive will allow you to iterate on the patient experience. Small improvements can compound over time, helping your business deliver a world-class customer experience. Considering that 54% of patients state that a word-of-mouth referral can significantly impact how they view an organization, building up customer loyalty with consistently great service is a win-win for your business.
Listening to the patient is now more common than ever, with 28% of healthcare executives stating that they ask patients for feedback more often. As a vital resource for improving your organization, soliciting feedback is too important to overlook.
How to use surveys to improve healthcare
Different healthcare providers use surveys in distinct ways, typically leveraging them to improve their business. For example, some savvy healthcare workers use surveys to boost their bottom line and navigate unexpected circumstances. On the other hand, some healthcare organizations, like Community Intervention Services Inc., will use healthcare surveys to collect critical insights related to Net Promoter Score® and other customer experience metrics.
However, healthcare surveys aren’t only for patients. Businesses can also leverage healthcare surveys to request feedback from people across their organization, from admin and medical practitioners to other providers. Understanding your employee experience will help you identify ways to improve it, leading to your employees giving better customer service.
Here are some of the ways you can transform your healthcare organization with surveys:
- Comply with federal accreditation requirements: Use surveys to streamline the process of meeting federal accreditation requirements and documentation.
- Track and manage your patient safety culture: Determine where your business could improve patient safety culture by surveying your staff on AHRQ patient safety culture examples.
- Measure healthcare employee engagement: Your employees are the driving force behind better patient experiences. By monitoring healthcare employee engagement and aiming to improve it, you’ll enhance customer experiences.
- Centralize hospital survey data in one place: Surveys offer a useful way of centralizing many forms of data collection, helping to better manage all your data in one place.
- Streamline patient intake: Your business can leverage online registration forms to rapidly check in new patients and ensure all your documents are in one convenient location.
- Benchmark patient satisfaction and loyalty: Constantly measuring customer experience metrics like the Net Promoter Score will help your business to benchmark its progress over time. You can refer to this data to prove the efficacy of your customer and employee experience programs.
- Perform market research: Conducting market research surveys in your organization will allow you to determine how your business stacks up against others in your industry. You can survey consumer sentiment and other core metrics to discover insights that keep you competitive.
Across these benefits, healthcare surveys present several benefits for organizations.
Related reading: The future of healthcare: Elevating the patient experience with data.
Types of healthcare surveys, free templates, and example questions
There are many types of healthcare surveys you can use to improve your organization. Here’s how to decide what healthcare surveys you should use based on your goals.
Patient satisfaction
The best way to understand your patient experience is to directly survey your patients for feedback. Using surveys like the post-visit patient satisfaction survey can help determine what went well and areas you could improve upon.
Ask your patients to tell you about their visit and the quality of their experience with doctors, support staff, and your facilities. You can also stay on top of patient requests by sending out health check-in surveys before their visits.
If you want to make sure you’re providing exceptional patient care, you can choose from different types of patient satisfaction surveys to measure your performance.
- CAHPS® Visit Survey 2.0 survey: Discover feedback and metrics set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services with this Patient Experience Survey Template.
- Hospital Visit survey: Better understand how satisfied your customers were with their hospital visit using this survey.
Net Promoter Score survey: Use the NPS Survey Template to better understand customer satisfaction across the board, reflecting how content your patients are with your services.
Patient safety culture and accreditation
Healthcare institutions must stay up-to-date with industry regulations in order to deliver the best possible services to their patients. SurveyMonkey research suggests that 40% of SurveyMonkey customers use healthcare surveys to improve the efficiency of their patient safety culture.
Healthcare surveys are a fantastic way of streamlining compliance and gathering all the data you need to maintain your certifications.
There are numerous other patient safety surveys that your business can use to streamline accreditation:
- CAHPS® Dental Plan Survey Template
- CAHPS® Health Plan Survey 4.0 Template
- Hospital Patient Safety Culture Template (AHRQ®)
- AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS™) Medical Office Survey Template
- AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™(SOPS™) Nursing Home Survey Template
- Personal Hygiene Template
- AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS™) Community Pharmacy Survey
- Smoking Template
Related reading: Healthcare focus: SurveyMonkey in action.
Healthcare employee engagement
One of the best ways to continuously deliver a high-class patient experience is to ensure your employees feel happy and supported at work. When they have a high degree of engagement, they’re more likely to offer a better experience to customers and make your hospital look even better.
Monitoring your engagement rates with employee engagement surveys will help you understand what your business could do to enhance the employee experience. Here are some healthcare employee engagement surveys you can use:
- Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): The eNPS offers overall levels of employee satisfaction in your organization, making this a great survey to measure healthcare employee engagement.
- Employee benefits: An Employee Benefits Planning Survey allows your healthcare workers to give feedback on the extent to which they feel the benefits your company offers are fair. This form of survey helps you determine whether you could support your employees more with your compensation packages.
- Belonging survey: Employees work best when they feel welcomed in the workplace. A Belonging and Inclusion Survey will help monitor your diversity and inclusion efforts and see if you could enhance them.
Evaluation surveys
Evaluation surveys are another way for patients to give feedback to your organization. You could launch surveys to collect specific data on anything from the quality of care to your hospital’s overall performance.
These surveys offer insight that allows you to identify areas for improvement and use that feedback to iteratively enhance the experience you offer patients.
- Hospital Performance Evaluation Template: Gather insight into how effectively your hospital functions and discover how you can improve.
- Veterinarian Office Staff Evaluation Template: Maintain the highest possible veterinary standards by discovering what visitors think of your staff. Leverage feedback from this survey to offer training and improve your customer service.
- Veterinarian Performance Evaluation Template: Discover whether or not visitors to your practice are happy with the quality of care from your veterinarians. Gather feedback that you can use to streamline customer service and enhance the patient experience.
Best practices for conducting healthcare surveys
A great healthcare survey goes beyond just sending out a request for information from your patients. A great survey will include the right questions and come at the right time, maximizing the quality of the information you receive from each patient.
As healthcare is a protected industry, healthcare surveys must also comply with regulations and compliance initiatives related to data security.
Here are some of our top tips for conducting effective healthcare surveys.
Ensure surveys are HIPAA-compliant
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has been a staple of the healthcare industry since the late 1990s. According to HIPAA, patient data must be protected, and any organization that does not employ severe data protection and patient confidentiality systems could potentially face a large fine.
A HIPAA-compliant survey will prevent inappropriate access to sensitive information, enter data into a BAA for maximum appliance and accreditation, and reliably collect data while abiding by the highest possible level of data security.
SurveyMonkey understands the importance of HIPPA-compliant features and has implemented multiple layers that safeguard confidential records and keep patient details secure.
Give context and ensure anonymity
Context matters when requesting information from patients. To ensure your business receives high-quality data, you need to contextualize it for your patients. When you send out a survey, introduce who it is from, why you’re sending it, and how you’ll use their feedback.
People are much more likely to take a survey if they understand your goal and know that their answers might positively impact their future experiences.
Another good rule-of-thumb is ensuring your patients know their responses are