How to set up an Effective Patient Feedback System

Patients always share their experiences with their friends, family and known ones and advise them to choose or stay away from some particular physicians, hospitals, or healthcare organizations. With the rise of online platforms, patients have also started sharing their experiences in the form of online reviews.

Bad reviews can seriously affect the reputation of your doctors and healthcare centre as 71% of patients look for online reviews before trying a new physician or healthcare provider. To avoid this, it is essential to use a patient feedback system to survey your patients, collect their feedback and take timely action on negative feedback before it does much harm to your healthcare business.

In this article, we will explore what a patient feedback system is, its advantages, how to set it up for your business, and some best practices to effectively use a patient feedback system. Let’s get started! 

TL;DR

• A patient feedback system is an application tool or software that is designed to create and share patient satisfaction surveys to collect, analyze, and manage patient feedback to measure and improve patient experience.
• Patient feedback system helps to gauge patient experience at all touchpoints, improve patient experience, track caregivers' performances, and improve the quality of patient care and healthcare services.
• To set up an effective patient feedback system, healthcare providers should form a group of people responsible for collecting and managing patient feedback, select a good patient feedback system, set up surveys with the right questions, choose the right channels to share feedback, set up feedback alerts & notifications, take action on feedback, and run the regular process of collecting and managing feedback.
• You can send surveys through various channels like in-app surveys, email surveys, SMS surveys, website surveys, and offline surveys through smart devices like tablets and kiosks.
• As a healthcare provider, you should follow some best practices while setting up and using a patient feedback system - gather feedback at every touchpoint, use patient experience metrics, use open-ended questions in surveys, and take action on feedback to close the feedback loop.
• Zonka Feedback is an effective patient feedback system that lets you collect, analyze and work on patient feedback effectively to improve patient experiences and enhance satisfaction. It also offers a free trial for 14 days.

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What is a Patient Feedback System?

A Patient feedback system is a software or application that is designed to create and share patient feedback surveys to effectively collect, analyze, and manage feedback from patients, and take action on it to enhance patient care and satisfaction and improve their overall experiences.

The objectives of a patient feedback system are:

• To collect feedback from the patients about your healthcare services.

• To know what patients feel about the care and health services they receive.

• To understand what patients expect from your healthcare provider organization.

• To track the performance of your doctors and other staff like nurses, ward boys, facilities, and pharmacy staff.

• To be able to deliver quality care and better patient experiences.

• To identify the pain points of the patients.

• To enhance patient engagement and retention, and create loyal patients.

• To enhance the goodwill and reputation of the healthcare organization.

• To attract more patients, satisfy them, and ultimately grow your business.

An effective patient feedback system helps you achieve these objectives and derive numerous benefits. Let’s explore some advantages of a good patient feedback system.

Advantages of a Patient Feedback System

If you use good patient feedback software or system, it helps you achieve your ultimate goals by giving these benefits.

• It helps you measure feedback at all touchpoints - With the help of a good patient feedback system, you can create any type of survey like inpatient surveys, outpatient surveys, health risk assessment surveys, COVID surveys, and more to collect patient feedback. Through these surveys, you can measure patient satisfaction at touchpoints like appointment booking,  admission into the hospital, just after an interaction with the doctor, post-discharge, at the pharmacy, hospital cafeteria, and more.

• It induces a culture of quality patient care among caregivers - You can give access to patient feedback data to your key teams so that they can view and take action on feedback in real time to improve patient experiences. This will motivate your medical staff and help to foster a culture of quality care among the caregivers.

• Feedback analytics help you make your processes better - When you analyze patient feedback, you will be able to identify the concerns and issues of your patients with your healthcare facilities and various processes like the appointment booking process, admission process, discharge process, and medical billing process by demedixrcm. This will help you to make the right decisions for your healthcare facility and make your processes better for the patients.

• It helps you improve the overall patient experience - When you take instant action on patients’ feedback and make your processes and healthcare facilities better for them, it improves their overall patient experience and great experiences contribute to the growth of your healthcare business.

• It helps you prevent churn and improve patient retention - When you are able to provide more satisfaction and deliver better experiences to your patients, it helps to avoid churn and enhances patient retention and patient loyalty. Loyal patients not only maintain a lasting relationship with your healthcare brand but also attract new patients through their positive reviews and word of mouth.

Let’s learn how you can measure patient feedback response data received in a patient feedback system.

Measuring Responses in a Patient Feedback System

When you have collected feedback from your patients, it is required to analyze that feedback data and measure the responses you have received in your patient feedback system to track the performance of your caregivers.

Patients’ experiences with your caregivers have a crucial impact on the overall patient experience, especially on your outpatients’ experiences when they stay in your hospital. So it is necessary to measure patients’ feedback to track the quality of the care provided by your caregivers. Here is what you can do.

• Measure feedback for specific caregivers - Utilize your patient feedback system to measure individual feedback about your caregivers. This will help you track which caregivers are able to provide quality care to the patients and which among them are failing to do so. 

• Get caregiver-wise performance comparison reports - A good patient feedback system also helps you get feedback comparison reports of your caregivers. You can use these reports to rate the performance of your caregivers.

• View caregiver satisfaction scores in Team Performance reports - In the team performance reports, you can view patient satisfaction scores with your caregivers. This will help you find the key areas of quality improvement of the care provided to the patients.

• Use feedback reports to implement better patient care - Share feedback data with your caregivers and train them on what patients expect and how they can implement feedback and provide better care to the patients to fulfil those patient expectations.

• Improve the overall quality of your healthcare and services - When you have found the key areas to improve, focus on those areas and leverage patient feedback to make the required quality improvements in your healthcare facilities. This will foster overall quality improvement of your healthcare and related services which will enhance the satisfaction of your patients and their overall experience.

Channels that can be a part of your Patient Feedback System

An effective patient feedback system enables you to collect feedback from your patients from a variety of channels. Here are some survey channels that can be a part of your process of feedback collection and quality improvement of your healthcare services.

• Offline Feedback Surveys - A good patient feedback system enables you to capture offline feedback from your patients when they are at your premises. You can share patient feedback surveys through iOS and Android devices like iPads and tablets by handing over those devices for some time to your patients to let them take the survey and submit their feedback. You can also set up survey kiosks at various locations of your hospital or clinic like waiting areas, reception, pharmacy, and cafeteria, in order to collect feedback at various touchpoints.

• Website and In-App Surveys - You can also share surveys on your website through feedback widgets like popup surveys, slide-up surveys, and feedback buttons to capture feedback from your website or healthcare application. You can trigger these surveys at touchpoints like appointment booking, getting medical reports, or general enquiries about doctors or their timings on your website.

• Email Surveys - You can also use emails to share surveys like post-discharge surveys. You can use email surveys with hyperlinks (where the survey invitation message is followed by a survey link), embedded email surveys (where the first question of the survey is embedded in the email body), and email signature surveys (where surveys are embedded with the signature of the regular emails.

• SMS Surveys - You can also share feedback surveys through SMS wherein a survey invitation text message is sent to the patients followed by a survey link.

• QR Code Surveys - You can also display QR codes at different locations of your hospital or healthcare centre which the patients or their family members can scan through mobile phones and take the survey to share feedback.

  

Let's explore how you can set up a patient feedback system in your hospital or healthcare centre.

How to set up a Healthcare Patient Feedback System?

A Patient Feedback system is not confined to simply sending a survey to the patients and asking them for Feedback. Instead, it acts as an effective medium of communication between the patients and the healthcare providers so that the patients can convey what they need and feel, and the healthcare providers can understand and fulfil patient expectations. 

While implementing a Patient Feedback system, there are some essential steps to follow to ensure you collect valuable and accurate patient insights and make the most of them to take your healthcare business to the next level. Here are the steps you should follow.

1. Form a group

The foremost step is to form a group of people responsible for obtaining patient feedback and working on it. The group would consist of some staff members, the upper management, and one or more doctors who will work on the patient feedback system to create, share or trigger surveys to collect patient feedback and work on it.

They would be deciding the touch points where you should take feedback like waiting areas, billing, after an appointment with the doctor, at the reception, pharmacy, hospital cafeteria, or testing laboratory. They will identify whom you should survey (visitors, patients or new patients, or their family members dealing with various staff, etc.) and decide how to connect them (channels like email, SMS, tablets, or kiosk surveys) and address their issues. They will be responsible for end-to-end feedback management.

2. Choose a Patient Feedback System or Tool

• It should allow you to create various types of surveys for inpatients and outpatients for various touchpoints.
• It should have the ability to gather feedback through multiple channels both for inpatients and outpatients through ways like SMS, Email, and on-premises survey channels like iPhone, iPad, Android tablets, smartphones and setting them up as kiosk survey devices.
• It should have the ability to create multilingual surveys because customers can be of different cultures, languages, and backgrounds.
• It should have the ability to track feedback across different areas or locations from a centralized location.
• It should have the ability to create customized surveys for different patients. You should be able to white-label your surveys and add your brand name with your styling and colors. 
• It should have the ability to set up triggers for sending surveys automatically at various touchpoints like an admission, a bill payment, a discharge, an interaction with the physician, etc.
• It should have the ability to provide real-time alerts and notifications for feedback that comes into the criteria set by you, like negative feedback or low rating. This will help you take immediate corrective actions to improve Patient Experience and close the feedback loop.
• It should have the ability to provide reports of patient feedback in real time.
• It should be able to measure popular metrics like NPS and Patient Satisfaction Score.

Overall, you need to choose the software that helps you not to collect patient feedback but also enables you to work on it and improve Patient Experience.

Also, always take a free trial of the patient feedback system you choose before its final implementation. This will help you ensure that the tool you have chosen works for you the way you expect.

3. Set up your surveys and ask the right questions

When you have chosen a patient feedback tool that suits your needs, the next step is to create and set up patient satisfaction surveys as per your requirements. Good Patient Survey tools nowadays provide multiple templates and question types for different types of surveys. Explore these healthcare survey templates available in the tool and choose the right feedback questions that help you measure satisfaction and gauge the experience of your patients.

Set up survey triggers for various touchpoints of the patient journey with the right questions to collect patient feedback about various aspects of your healthcare services.

After creating the surveys, share surveys through the channels that work the best. You can collect feedback through various channels as mentioned earlier in the article. Consider sharing surveys through multiple channels including offline and online channels for inpatients and outpatients.

You can set up your patient feedback system on devices like iPhones, iPads, Android tablets, and smartphones to collect offline feedback. You can also set up these devices as kiosk at various locations of your hospital or healthcare centre.

You can also use online channels like in-app surveys, email, SMS, and social media for gathering patient feedback. The key is to be omnipresent, i.e., you need to be on multiple channels wherever your customers are available and are willing to share Feedback.

5. Set up Alerts for your Teams

With the help of a good patient feedback system, you can easily set up instant alerts for every feedback in real time. These real-time alerts and notifications will help you and your team to assign tasks to take immediate action on the feedback before it's too late and they switch to another doctor or healthcare provider.

6. Resolve Patients' Issues

Taking timely action on the feedback received is as important as collecting feedback in the first place. Studies suggest that 52% of patients who posted negative feedback reviews on even the most popular websites like Google say the medical professionals never contacted them to address their concerns. This becomes the core reason for patients switching to other healthcare providers.

Whereas, addressing patients' concerns properly can double their satisfaction. Always follow up with your patients to know where things went wrong, and do the maximum to resolve their issues. Doing this will prevent your patients from churning and avoid lousy word of mouth and negative feedback reviews about your health services in the industry.

7. Continue measuring feedback

Capturing feedback is not a one-time process. You can utilize its effectiveness only if you keep measuring it after every interaction or touchpoints or at regular intervals. Gradually, you will be able to improve the patient satisfaction scores and track them by viewing regular reports in your patient feedback system.

Set up receiving regular reports with the reporting and analytics feature of your patient feedback system and track your growth. Use the right strategies to improve your processes and train your staff to improve the services and provide better care to the patients.

Let’s learn some best practices for using a patient feedback system effectively.

Some Best practices to Use a Patient Feedback System Effectively

Here are some tips to use while using a patient feedback system to survey your patients.

• Collect feedback at every touchpoint - Share surveys to collect patient feedback at all touchpoints of the patient journey like appointment booking, admission into the hospital, waiting time for the appointment, after an interaction with the doctors, buying of medicines, billing and payment. This helps you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your healthcare business and target the key areas where you can make improvements to create better experiences for your patients.

• Use metrics like NPS and Patient Satisfaction Score - Use popular metrics like Net Promoter Score and Patient Satisfaction Score to measure the satisfaction and loyalty of your patients generated through their experiences with your healthcare brand. It will also help you track the improvement in your healthcare services with the help of reports and dashboards by seeing your graph up or down.

• Provide open-ended space for patients to describe their experiences - Patient experiences can be unique and hard to cover under the limited options you provide in the closed-ended feedback questions. So always provide an open-ended space or optional question to let your patients share their experiences in detail in their own words. This rich feedback will be helpful to understand patient experience better and make better decisions. 

• Respond to and follow up on every feedback - Respond to every feedback to let the patients know that you care about their opinions. Follow up on their responses by asking the reasons for their ratings. This will help you know where things are perfectly fine and where you need to improve.

• Take action and Close the feedback loop - Feedback without taking any action on it becomes worthless and defeats the entire purpose of gathering patient feedback. So always take action on feedback wherever required and let your patients know what you have done to improve their experiences or create better experiences in the future, thereby closing the feedback loop effectively.

  On the other hand, if you leave feedback unattended, next time your patients will not even care to share their experiences and your patient feedback system will become useless.

Conclusion

A good patient feedback system is necessary for your healthcare business to know how patients perceive the care and services you provide them and improve them to create better experiences and grow your healthcare business.

Zonka Feedback is an effective patient feedback system that you can use for this purpose. It not only helps you create and share patient surveys but also enables you to take instant action on the feedback with the help of features like real-time alerts and notifications and close the feedback loop effectively to enhance patient experience and satisfaction.

It also offers a free trial. Try Zonka Feedback for free for 14 days and see how it works to boost your healthcare business.