While your primary job is to provide care and treatment to all your patients, how do you know if they feel content with your care? Measuring patient satisfaction can help you understand what you’re doing well and where you or the clinic can improve.
Since satisfied people are more likely to return and recommend your practice to others, this data is crucial for all providers.
How to Measure Patient Satisfaction in Healthcare
Surveys are among the most common options health facilities use to measure patient satisfaction. Since they’re easy to create and most people are familiar with them, it’s no wonder the survey has endured over time.
If you’re ready to discover how to add a patient experience survey to your process, you’ve come to the right place. Below, explore our top six tips for creating a high-quality feedback tool!
1. Use the HCAHPS Survey
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services developed a standardized, national patient satisfaction survey that many health organizations use. It’s called the “Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems,” or HCAHPS (CAHPS).
If you use the HCAHPS survey, the data is public, which can increase transparency. It has a total of 29 questions focusing on experience.
And despite the CMS creating it, anyone can participate, not just those with Medicare or Medicaid. This program is beneficial for providers who want to use a pre-existing survey.
2. Create a Digital Survey
You may also choose to customize a digital survey for your clinic. Whether you want to design your own for regular use or use it with popular tools like HCAHPS, custom digital surveys can be beneficial.
If you build a questionnaire from scratch or customize one from another source, here are some things to keep in mind:
Try to aim for fewer than 10 questions.
Center questions on areas you can realistically improve, like staff behavior or wait times.
Choose a consistent method for analyzing results, like a Net Promoter Score, top-box satisfaction or an average.
These basics can help you build a high-quality survey to determine your patients’ satisfaction with your practice.
3. Choose a Benchmark or Goal
When creating or adapting a survey, it helps to have a goal. If you don’t have a specific benchmark in mind, you can aim for a patient satisfaction level at (or above) industry averages.
Regardless of your goals for measuring patient experience, ensure they are reasonably achievable. That means you shouldn’t pick something so easy you’ve essentially done it, but nothing so complicated it would take years to complete.
Then, once you reach a goal, you can move on to one that’s a little more challenging.
4. Ask Relevant and Easy-to-Understand Questions
The questions you include in a survey should have qualities that help them elicit authentic responses. Ensure questions are:
- Relevant to patient satisfaction
- Easy to read and understand
- Short and straightforward
- Suitable for repeated use across questionnaires
- Controllable, as in centered around issues you can regularly address
It’s also crucial to remember that questions should not be too personal, since that often causes people to forgo answering. As for what to ask, here are some ideas tailored to patient satisfaction:
- The ease of scheduling
- If they felt they were included in the decision-making process
- Timeliness of the provider
- Overall satisfaction with the visit and care provided
- If the clinic (waiting area, provider rooms) were clean and comfortable
- If they thought the doctor communicated well and listened to their concerns
- How likely they are to recommend the provider or clinic to others
If you’d like to include an open-ended question, ask participants to leave feedback about what they believe you could do to improve the practice.
5. Use Consistent Scales for Scoring
Much like how providers need a consistent way to analyze results, participants should also have a standard way to respond to questions.
For example, you could have patients answer on a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best) or use the Likert scale. No matter what you choose, stick with it for the entirety of the survey, barring any open-ended questions.
6. Make Surveys Anonymous
Patients are generally more likely to complete a survey if it is anonymous. Keep all answers safe, secure and private to maintain confidentiality.
You can assign ID numbers to the feedback to make tracking submissions easier. If you’d like, you can provide the option for an individual to provide their name, especially if they want to be contacted about their concerns.
Ready to Put Patient Experience Metrics to Good Use?
Once you have the data, it’s time to put it to good use to improve patient satisfaction, and continuing medical education (CME) can help. Attending in-person and online seminars allows you to learn how to enhance the patient experience, from communication strategies to new treatments.