Vital signs: How to transform your healthcare organization with surveys

Healthcare professionals are united by common goals delivering efficient and effective care for patients, families, and communities. But running an organization that consistently and efficiently meets those needs is an entirely different matter.

Whether you’re a provider, caregiver, administrator, or just about anybody else involved in care, you know there are many moving parts to care, and there are often gaps along the continuum.  To provide care, staff need to be engaged; everyone needs to communicate, state and national healthcare standards must be met and a hundred other little pieces need to come together—not to mention scheduling and billing.

Now more than ever, it’s important for organizations to listen to the people they serve and find ways to help them cope with the new challenges they’re facing. The solution? Feedback at scale.

Surveys are a powerful tool to help you make continuous improvements in operations, interventions, and outcomes.

This eGuide is divided into two parts. In Part I, you’ll learn how to add quantitative feedback into your continuous improvement programs with surveys so you can:

In Part II our survey scientists help you perform survey triage to make sure your survey is ready to go—from question-writing dos and don’ts to survey design tips and tricks.

When properly used, surveys are a powerful tool to help you run a better medical organization by improving everybody’s experience, from your patients to your employees.

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Patients have become savvy healthcare consumers. They shop for providers and services the same way they shop for other products; they seek out reviews, ratings, and “extras” that equate to a better experience. Many patients are very willing to post their sentiments and experiences on review boards that can have a big influence on an organization’s success.

Despite the importance of this feedback, research shows that outside of patient satisfaction surveys, other types of surveys might be underutilized by today’s healthcare providers. A West Corporation survey of 1,036 adults and 317 healthcare providers in the U.S. found that only 12% of healthcare providers use surveys to identify health risks, 7% use surveys to monitor metrics that indicate how well patients are managing health conditions, and just 9% use surveys to monitor patients after they have been discharged from the hospital.

The West survey also found that 86% of Americans are willing to participate in a healthcare survey if prompted by their doctor. And, the good news is that there are many types of surveys that patients are willing to respond to, that go beyond patient satisfaction.

Patients indicated interest in surveys about health risk assessments (83%), gaps-in-care surveys (78%), medication adherence surveys (74%), remote health monitoring surveys (79%), and post-discharge surveys (85%).

Using patient experience surveys throughout the journey can be easily accomplished with an enterprise-grade platform that offers flexibility, security, and compliance required by healthcare organizations.

Source: www.surveymonkey.com/resources/premium/how-feedback-can-improve-the-patient-experience/

Smarter decisions for your entire organization
Empower staff across your healthcare organization with SurveyMonkey Enterprise, an easy-to-use survey platform that improves patient care and employee engagement.

Questions? Email us at healthcare@surveymonkey.com or visit surveymonkey.com/mp/enterprise to get started today.

Patient feedback is a useful tool to help you deliver best-in-class patient experiences that ensure your organization stays competitive.

A case study sheds some light on how patient surveys can be effective. At a large healthcare organization in a major metropolitan area, bedside care was under fire. Patient feedback was overwhelmingly negative and the organization’s 30,000 staff members had no streamlined way of tracking feedback responses across multiple locations.

Using SurveyMonkey, the organization was able to deploy a consistent method to collect and analyze feedback and recommend specific actions. Patient satisfaction has improved and physicians and administrators are pleased to have new best practices that are consistent throughout the organization.

You may also need surveys to meet state and national standards when it comes to patient care. For example, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ) recommends a series of “surveys and tools to advance patient-centered care.”

These feedback programs have 3 goals: