In a Gallup poll from earlier this year, healthcare continues to be a top concern for Americans. Adding to this concern is the rise of out of pocket expenses that patients are facing. For 2018, patients experienced up to 12% increases for their inpatient, outpatient, and emergency department care. Another Gallup poll relating to 2018 indicated that stress and worry intensified in America. With accelerating changes in technology, culture, knowledge, the environment, and concerns relating to finances and job security, we should continue to see stress and anxiety impact patients for years to come.
Stress also impacts organizations in all lines of business due to the continued demand for bottom line growth. As a way to differentiate an organization in this new digital environment, providing top notch service provides a competitive edge along with building loyalty and improving the bottom line. Customers and patients are looking for certainty in this digital age by seeking reviews and ratings on the organizations that provide the services they need. To meet this need and to enhance the services they provide, organizations are spending more resources to collect feedback from the individuals that use their services.
What is the big picture implication of all of this as it relates to the patient experience? Patients are bringing more stress and anxiety into the patient experience. This stress continues within the experience due to circumstances like finances. With information overload along with advertising and survey fatigue, capturing individual attention continues to become challenging. This is occurring in an environment where health care facilities are looking to obtain more patient feedback to enhance their ratings along with improving patient and public perception.
Make it simple for the patient
One way to add value to the patient experience within this current environment is to make it simple and easy for a patient to give feedback. Along with keeping it simple, another way to add value to both the patient and the healthcare facility is to capture this feedback while the patient is IN the experience. By keeping it simple, the patient spends less energy to give the feedback. Providing a simple and easy way for a patient to have a voice can increase the amount of feedbacks and increase the quality of the data set.
By capturing the feedback while the patient is IN the experience, the feedback is obtained while the patient is experiencing an emotion. The patient does not have to attempt to go back in time at some later point and try to recollect an emotion they felt days to weeks prior. Another positive aspect of capturing the feedback in real time is that it does not require the health care facility to take the patient off task after they have left the facility. By requesting a patient to give feedback after they have left the facility means that they will have attention be taken away from their family and other personal objectives that they are looking to accomplish.
How to capture simple real time feedback
Two simple ways to simply capture the patient perception is a HappyOrNot® Smiley Terminal and Smiley Touch by SmileyAnswers. The Smiley Terminal is a battery operated kiosk that can be moved to any point along a patient experience. With one question and four buttons to respond in a positive or negative manner, the simplicity makes giving feedback tremendously easy for the patient which allows more feedback to increase the validity of the data set for the health care facility. The responses given by the patients are time stamped and sent out each night for review.
A Smiley Touch from SmileyAnswers allows more detail to be obtained within the feedback process. Similar to the Smiley Terminal, the Smiley Touch has an initial question for the patient to give a positive or negative response. The difference with a Smiley Touch is that it has two more screens to capture the reason why a patient chose the positive or negative response along with an option to give additional individual typed feedback. With the Smiley Touch, real time feedback is shown on the health care facilities dashboard immediately.
In this current age where bad experiences can be shared over the internet instantly, having access to real time feedback will continue to become a priority to be competitive and to manage patient perceptions and expectations. With real time feedback, quick changes can be made to the patient experience as hidden pain points are discovered. This real time approach will allow organizations to have the pulse of patient perception in a time where expectations are constantly changing.
Wrapping it up
Stress and anxiety continue to impact patients prior to and while they are in the patient experience. As organizations both in and out of health care strive to improve the services they provide, they ask for more feedback from their customers and patients which leads to more survey fatigue. Health care facilities can respond to these circumstances by adding value to their patients with simple and easy real time feedback. Capturing feedback while the patient is in the experience will decrease calls and surveys to the patient after they have left the health care facility.
A solution for facilities to help them capture this feedback includes the HappyOrNot® Smiley Terminals or Smiley Touches provided by SmileyAnswers. Two other options to collect feedback include a Web Smiley and a Smiley Wall. A Web Smiley captures simple feedback while the patient is online while a Smiley Wall can be used to capture feedback where there is limited floor space. By keeping feedback simple, easy, enjoyable and engaging, health care facilities can respond to their needs for quality data while at the same time providing value to the patient by honoring the patients time and attention.
Contact SmileyAnswers today to learn more about how we make capturing feedback simple and effective.
