Patient Journey Innovations
During: Manage expectations and learn in-the-moment
Every healthcare organization sends its patients post-discharge satisfaction surveys, but if you are not intentionally engaging with and learning from patients while they are physically within the walls of your organization, you are missing a massive opportunity to ensure a consistently positive patient experience.
We have the pleasure of working intimately with numerous Patient and Family Advisory Committees at our partner healthcare organizations and one thing that is abundantly clear is how many highs and lows are felt during a typical patient experience. Patients are understandably most sensitive and attune to the numerous touchpoints they have while in the hospital, yet most organizations are not taking advantage of this opportunity to learn and perfect patient experiences by engaging at key moments. Rather, they are waiting until a patient is discharged in the hopes they will still be willing to provide feedback on the comprehensive experience.
The faster you receive feedback, the faster you can act on it. If you can ask the right questions, while an encounter is still happening, the insights you receive will provide a true reflection of a patient’s impression of their care and allow you to act in the moment. Acting on timely, relevant feedback you can ensure issues are addressed as soon as they occur and improve your processes so that future first impressions and experiences are even better. Understanding and positively influencing your patient experiences while the patient is receiving care will have a direct impact on patient loyalty and satisfaction.
Feedtrail can help you gather immediate insights and implement early service recovery, by leveraging real-time engagement during a patient visit. The Feedtrail XM platform updates the moment feedback is received, alerting the appropriate caregivers and prompting them to take action. Whether you’re trying to improve your wait experience, need to provide standard updates at check-in, working to create a glowing first impression, or want to know what you could improve before a patient walks out the door, onsite feedback can have a huge impact on your bottom line and processes. Here are some ways Feedtrail customers leverage this timely outreach:
Several organizations are using Feedtrail to greet their patients upon arrival and check-in and provide useful information. Feedtrail can send a message to your patients when they check in so they can read it while they wait for their appointment and feel confident in their upcoming care journey. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many customers switched their standard welcome messages to ones that highlighted new safety precautions they had in place or FAQs related to navigating the hospital. This new messaging helped combat patient churn, ease anxiety, and answer common questions.
Whether you’re curious to learn how a patient feels the moment they step into your hospital or what they care about most related to their medical experience, one key, but often overlooked opportunity to engage with patients is around their first impression. The first impression is established from the initial moments of contact and will dictate the perceived quality of the overall experience. Feedtrail can identify which patients have never received care at your organization and send out first impression surveys with analytics to understand patient sentiment while they are still on site. An inpatient partner of ours needed to keep tabs on patient interactions with staff other than doctors – nurses, technicians, front desk, etc. The problem was that once patients met the doctor, their satisfaction scores were heavily weighted by those interactions. Feedtrail sent the patients a quick, one-question survey to the patients before the doctor arrived in the room. This led to previously unobtainable insights and allowed for significant process improvement.
Nobody likes waiting and wait time scores are consistently the lowest patient experience metric. But there’s no need to give up hope. Let Feedtrail help you discover the underlying reasons behind wait time dissatisfaction, so you can actually improve your patients’ wait experience. One prominent organization couldn’t improve their wait time scores, even though their average wait time was much shorter than nearby competitors. Feedtrail helped them learn that the actual issue was that patients were bored in the waiting room and as a result perceived their wait time as much longer than it really was. Improving the waiting room experience by adding entertainment for adults and children finally improved their satisfaction scores – even for longer wait times.
If you want to improve your patient experience, there’s no better place to start than with your providers. The patient-provider relationship is consistently one of the most important components of your overall PX score. Feedtrail’s provider-specific feedback can provide you quantitative and qualitative feedback for specific providers, so you know who your high performers are, and who needs coaching. Most of Feedtrail’s customers are drilling down to the provider level for feedback. Whether it’s building individual performance improvement plans, providing data for compensation plans, or spotlighting the rock stars that keep their patients extremely happy, the ability to get feedback on specific providers, regardless of care setting, is one of Feedtrail’s most popular uses.
Some of the trickiest aspects of patient experience are in the white spaces between care settings – when a new provider takes over, when a patient is moved between departments, or when a patient transitions to home care. Feedtrail can illuminate these often-untracked moments, so you have useful, actionable feedback when the patient is on the move and feeling unsettled. An inpatient organization noticed that their PX scores were declining among patients with longer stays. After trying several tactics to improve various aspects of care, they turned to Feedtrail. Using transition of care questions, the organization learned that communication during the handoff between care providers needed to be improved. Once that issue was resolved, PX scores began to rise again.
When a patient is discharged, you lose the ability to fix the in-the-moment problems or overcome challenges they’ve faced. And you can’t fix something you don’t know exists. With Feedtrail, it’s easy to give patients one last chance to tell you how their experience went while they’re still in your care. Happy with their experience scores, but hoping for more insightful feedback, one organization shifted the timeframe of their Feedtrail surveys. Instead of sending surveys out the day after the patient’s appointment, surveys were delivered a few hours before patients left the facility. The organization’s PX scores stayed high, plus they started receiving thoughtful feedback which helped them identify areas where they could improve even further, specifically related to prepping patients for a seamless discharge.
Sending messages to your patients before their encounters begin is a great way to build relationships and surveying them afterwards lets you gauge how you’re doing. But if you’re not keeping tabs on patients during their encounters, while they’re still in the middle of their experience, you’re missing a huge opportunity to improve, manage expectations, and solve problems before they surface in reviews or post-discharge surveys. Let Feedtrail bring visibility to areas of your service you may have never considered before, so you can act in the moment, armed with powerful insights. Learn more: https://www.feedtrail.com/solutions/.