Patient Journey Innovations
Post: Exceed expectations and foster loyalty
Your patient has completed their visit and can reflect on their entire experience. What better time to ask them about it? Fill in the gaps that traditional post-discharge surveys miss by sending a survey soon after they’ve left and asking questions relevant to you, your initiatives and priorities, and the patient, taking into account their demographics and journey. With Feedtrail, post-experience engagement can cover a range of interactions and topics, helping you go beyond just understanding “what happened” to nurturing relationships with each individual patient. Here are some ways Feedtrail customers are leveraging this flexible outreach:
This is the bread and butter of patient experience. You want to ask questions that get to the heart of an encounter and provide actionable information so you can know what’s going on, where you’re doing well, and how you can improve. While short and sweet surveys have a better response rate, occasionally you want to find out more. One organization sends a long, comprehensive survey to patients every other year and, to boost responses, they enter patients for a chance to win a $100 gift card which increased their response rates by 20%. Whether you’re using short initiative-specific surveys or gathering more comprehensive information, Feedtrail’s flexible surveys help you uncover powerful insights to inform impactful changes.
A patient’s experience doesn’t end when an encounter does. Whether it’s making sure patients are taking medication as prescribed or resolving billing issues, you want to continue an open dialogue to support patients when they’re not within your walls. This engagement increases patient compliance while strengthening relationships. One Feedtrail client realized their patients often had difficulty paying their bills, not because of financial issues, but because they didn’t understand the bill or how to get help. The hospital began sending a “billing” survey 60 days post-visit to see if the patient understood the bill, whether they thought it was accurate, and share how to get help from the billing department if needed. In the first year after implementing this survey, the billing department resolved over 150 issues that would have prevented or delayed payments.
Often a single encounter isn’t the entirety of an experience and a patient will continue a course of treatment over several days, weeks, or months or perhaps there’s a protocol for the patient to follow at home. Whatever the case, Feedtrail can share next steps with your patients at the right time, ensuring successful continuation and completion of treatment. A bariatric surgery center needed a way to ensure patients were following the proper protocols at home before and after their surgery. Perfectly-timed “Next Steps” messages from Feedtrail helped deliver information to patients, provide the opportunity to ask questions, and even improve patient outcomes. Feedtrail’s agile engagement lets you deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right patient
A simple thank you can go a long way in strengthening your patient relationships, creating a connection, and potentially smoothing over difficulties. Feedtrail will send your desired thank you messages and can even deliver additional useful information to the patient by directing them to your website, a social media review page, or wherever you’d like patients to go. One surgery center improved their patient retention simply by sending out a thank you message six weeks after surgery. The message checked in with the patient to made sure they were feeling okay and offered help with various aspects of long-term care. Within six months, they saw a noticeable increase in follow-up appointments
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.
One aspect of patient-centered care is monitoring how your patients are doing when they’re not in front of your providers. Feedtrail can send out quick surveys which help patients self-report blood pressure, blood sugar level, ongoing symptoms, and more. One organization used Feedtrail to boost compliance with their initiative to have patients self-report their blood pressure using at-home cuffs. Compliance improved immediately, allowing the organization to focus on the patients who needed treatment rather than wasting resources figuring out who those patients were.
Social determinants of health (SDOH) are non-medical factors that influence health outcomes including income level, education level, and access to transportation. Whether you’re collecting SDOH information for government reporting purposes or just because you want to better understand and serve your patient population, Feedtrail’s got you covered. One leading organization with government reporting responsibilities needed to boost their response rate of health equity and social determinant information. With Feedtrail they easily and quickly modified their surveys to include demographic questions. Not only did they receive far more responses than necessary to fulfill reporting, they were also alerted to gaps in their services which were disproportionately affecting already underserved demographics. Armed with this new information, they were able to improve service to their entire patient population.
If your patients love you (and why wouldn’t they?) then they’ll want to talk about you to their friends and family. You should give them as large a megaphone as possible, and direct them to your social media review sites. Feedtrail can send your supporters to your social media review sites so your scores reflect the incredible service you provide. One large hospital system knew from their patient experience scores that they were giving excellent service, but their online reviews simply didn’t match. Only 70% of their providers had Google reviews, and their average score was stuck at 3.3/5. They started using Feedtrail’s Reputation Management tool with incredible results. Within one month 91% of providers had feedback and the organization’s new average rating was 4.78/5.
No experience management process is complete without a post-visit component. But it’s not as simple as sending out some standard questions and waiting to get responses. Smart organizations know that asking the right questions at the right time can bubble up valuable information, and that questions are just one way to engage with patients. Following up after an appointment, helping facilitate at-home care, journey-specific reminders, and even simple thank you messages can all strengthen the bond between patients and your organization. With the Feedtrail XM platform you have the flexibility to foster loyalty, decrease churn, and impact your bottom line with personalized engagement and actionable insights. Learn more: https://www.feedtrail.com/solutions/.