Patient satisfaction manifests from how patients perceive and evaluate the healthcare services they receive. It is an essential indicator for measuring the quality of healthcare.
With the appropriate knowledge of patient satisfaction, healthcare professionals (HCPs) gain crucial insight and tools to provide timely, efficient, and patient-centered care. However, to do this, HCPs must ask the right questions about patient satisfaction.
The following seven questions can help you understand patient satisfaction and reap the rewards.
1. Why is patient satisfaction important?
Patient satisfaction is significant because it fuels and measures the success of a medical practice. It motivates your staff to provide the best healthcare and most patient-friendly services possible. Striving to achieve high levels of patient satisfaction is equivalent to pursuing excellence — professionalism, quality, efficiency, and compassion in healthcare to the highest standard.
Simply put, patient satisfaction is a metric that tells you whether you and your team are meeting and surpassing your goals.
2. Who benefits from high patient satisfaction?
Listening to patients’ views and striving to improve their satisfaction primarily benefits patients. Such effort puts patients at the center of everything providers do in their practices. There is little chance that this will lead to unfavorable outcomes.
But, when HCPs or any healthcare system improves patient satisfaction, they reap benefits from it, too. These benefits include higher patient retention rates, positive reviews, referrals, fewer no-shows, all of which contribute to an improved bottom line.
Providers that work hard to improve patient satisfaction create a better version of their medical practice. Practice management software like Curogram can help by automating many tasks, so you have more time to focus on the patients in your care.
3. How to achieve patient satisfaction?
Achieving patient satisfaction and keeping it high is a challenge. The best way to do it is by listening and understanding patients, their needs, feelings, and thoughts.
These are driving factors for patient satisfaction, and taking decisive steps to work on them benefits your practice and the patient. That means being patient-centered by setting goals and implementing strategies that reflect your commitment to high patient satisfaction.
4. What are the factors that drive patient satisfaction?
With patients at the center of the measurement for patient satisfaction, the factors directly affecting it revolve around them. They include what patients perceive and consider essential to their health and well-being in general, contributing to making their lives easy and happy. The following are top examples of what factors drive patient satisfaction:
Patient Safety and Data Protection
Peace of mind is among the best drivers of patient satisfaction. Patients consider their safety and the security of any personal information shared with any provider among their top priorities.
Streamlined and Accessible Services via Text Messaging
Patients prefer providers that offer convenient communication and booking procedures. That’s why they value practices that implement streamlined and accessible interactions, such as via 2-way text messaging.
A Fast and Convenient Patient Intake Process
Every minute providers save for patients adds to patient satisfaction points. We know everybody values time and offering patients quick and convenient intake steps is a plus!
Rapid and Reliable Quality Care
Rapid, personalized, and effective healthcare is the summation of patient satisfaction. No patient is ever happy about delayed, detached, or ineffective diagnoses, treatment, or medication.
Convenient Payment Methods
Payment methods may not directly affect the clinical outcome of a patient. However, payment complications can quickly turn a pleasant in-office or telemedicine experience into a bad one.
Many other factors contribute to patient satisfaction and boil down to these common elements that influence it: security, convenience, accessibility, and patient-focused care.
5. How to measure patient satisfaction?
What better way to measure patient satisfaction than to ask the patient? A patient satisfaction survey does the job well. Patient survey questions help providers gauge patient satisfaction. For example, a telehealth patient satisfaction survey allows providers to listen to patients’ thoughts and feelings about a recent virtual consultation.
In 2002, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) introduced the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey to capture patient satisfaction of hospital care.
Hospital or medical practice ratings and reviews sites also show how you prosper in your patient satisfaction goals.
6. When can you say that you have achieved patient satisfaction?
Surveys and HCAHPS scores are only the tip of the iceberg when gauging whether your patient satisfaction rating is the best possible. They give you insights into how patients perceive and experience your care delivery. But the accurate indicator of patient satisfaction success is when you see the fruits of your labor:
- A stable, loyal patient base
- An increasing patient base
- An efficient office workflow
- A high-morale staff
- Lower operational costs
- Higher revenue
7. Is there a software solution that can help healthcare providers improve patient satisfaction?
Yes. Curogram, a HIPAA-compliant telemedicine software platform, offers secure and straightforward 2-way text messaging with patients, staff, and other offices. It helps providers streamline patient communications, booking, and intake procedures. Most importantly, for patient satisfaction boosting, it has an automatic survey and ratings feature that enables you to send patients simple one-line text surveys.
The right questions lead to positive patient satisfaction outcomes.
HCPs earn more than answers from asking the right questions about patient satisfaction. They acquire powerful tools for improving patient outcomes, care efficiency, and the upkeep of their respective practices. With Curogram’s suite of features that focus on patient satisfaction, it all becomes much more manageable.