Vital signs: How to transform your healthcare organization with surveys
Table of Contents
Welcome
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:
- Better understand the patient experience—and get patients the care they need
- Stay compliant and achieve accreditation
- Measure staff engagement and assess gaps in training, communication, and more
- Perform medical research and reach study participants
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.
Continuously monitor the patient experience
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.
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 satisfaction surveys
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:
- Produce data about patients’ perspectives of care that allow objective and meaningful comparisons of hospitals on topics that are important to consumers.
- Enhance accountability in healthcare by increasing transparency of the quality of hospital care provided in return for the public investment.
- Encourage public reporting of the survey results—which creates new incentives for hospitals to improve quality of care.
Compliance? Accreditation? Check and check!
Surveys can also be required by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for certain healthcare providers, hospitals, home health agencies, hospices, and durable medical equipment, prosthetics, orthotics, and supplies agencies that participate in the Medicare program.
For these programs and services, Medicare requires organizations to become accredited by meeting national healthcare standards before they are able to participate with Medicare. One way organizations can collect this patient data is by using AHRQ’s Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey templates.
To help you get started, visit surveymonkey.com/learn/healthcare/ where you’ll find the following ready-to-use CAHPS survey templates:
These CAHPS surveys ask patients to report on and evaluate their healthcare experiences. They also cover topics that are important to consumers and focus on aspects of quality that consumers are best qualified to assess, such as the communication skills of providers and ease of access to healthcare services.
SurveyMonkey was instrumental in the success of a major project at MCCHD: public health accreditation. As part of the lengthy process, I had to assess staff competencies and develop training. I also needed to make sure staff were aware of certain policies and how to put them into action. Surveys made getting feedback needed to make these requirements incredibly easy and fast.
Robin Neilson-Cerquone
Accreditation Specialist, Missoula City-County Health Department
Patient safety culture
Along with the CAHPS surveys, which focus on patient experience, AHRQ created a series of patient safety culture surveys to get vital information from doctors, nurses, and staff about the patient safety practices at their organization. In order to meet AHRQ’s national patient safety standards, many organizations—from nursing homes to pharmacies—are required to collect and submit their patient safety culture survey results regularly.
We created ready-to-use survey templates based on AHRQ patient safety culture surveys to help you analyze the data you collect, quickly, and act on insights to better meet patient safety goals.
Patient safety surveys can help you:
- Better identify opportunities for improvement
- Measure staff comfort with raising patient safety concerns
- Understand the efficacy of your teamwork goals and philosophies in achieving a safer care
- Assess where your organization needs to invest in more staff training
Online surveys are also a great way to allow employees to file incident reports and offer an anonymous way to enable healthcare workers to give recommendations or call out unsafe practices.
It’s easy to create safety surveys
We’ve done the heavy lifting so you can get right down to business and focus on maximizing patient safety. Visit https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/patient-safety-culture-surveys-ahrq/ for the following patient safety culture survey templates:
Staff experience
Patient satisfaction. Accreditation. Patient safety culture. Find out how engaged your staff are by measuring how they think and feel about their work and opportunities for improvement. Are they happy with their benefits? Are they satisfied with their overall job security? Do they enjoy the workplace culture and feel aligned with their organization’s goals? Attract (and retain) top talent by finding out where your organization is falling short—so you can help your employees feel loyal towards the success of your organization.
What do healthcare workers say?
Our survey of senior-level healthcare professionals showed that although a majority are satisfied with the training their organization provides (68%) and with the amount of patient interaction they have in their position (74%), they’re less enthusiastic about the level of communication at their organization.
Retaining employees can be especially difficult in larger organizations. Less than half of the people we surveyed who work in a hospital setting say the senior leaders in their organizations are good communicators (45%). However, when we looked at smaller organizations or practices, that number rises to 63%.
