Patient experience is something that you deliver to patients.
Patient satisfaction, on the other hand, is entirely on the patient’s experience and their expectations.
Struggling with marketing your healthcare business?
Don’t get enough patient reviews?
You need to figure out what the problems are (yes, problems, plural).
You cannot diagnose potential issues with your practice, staff, reputation, providers unless you actively participate in soliciting responses from patients.
Patient satisfaction surveys help you do just that.
If you are starting out with all these initiatives, it behooves you to first begin with surveying your patients.
It allows you to find out more about your own medical practice and about yourself.
What’s working, what is not working, what the patients see as issues (some that you are aware of and some that you might not be aware of) etc.
Running patient satisfaction surveys are not very difficult to do.
There are many software that are commercially available and help you run satisfaction surveys.
If you do not want to use any survey tools, you can very easily run surveys all by yourself, with your team as well.
Why bother with patient satisfaction surveys?
Conducting patient satisfaction surveys can truly serve as a diagnostic tool for your practice and can help identify opportunities for improvement in care, reduce costs, monitor performance of health plans and provide a comparison across healthcare institutions.
The goal of patient satisfaction survey is to assess your patient’s perception of the practice.
So why is it important?
By conducting patient satisfaction surveys, first and foremost you will be letting your patients know that their opinion is very important and their feedback will help you provide quality services.
It will help you provide better care and also ensure that the time your patients spend with you is as pleasant as possible.
Next, it will help you compete with other healthcare providers and set your standards.
It will help measure the overall rating of your medical practice and responsiveness of your staff.
It will also help provide rewards and recognition to the staff at practice who are performing well, which in turn will increase the quality of care.
It will improve quality of communication of doctors with patients which is a key to patient satisfaction.
Gauging patient satisfaction and using the feedback to implement or build on quality improvement initiatives will help demonstrate a commitment to patient-centered care and improve overall medical service experience.