Why Patient Satisfaction Surveys Matter

August, 2021

Let’s face it — patients have a lot to say about their healthcare experience and rightfully so. While you may not always want to hear the feedback — positive, negative, or indifferent — it’s crucial to listen to ensure incremental and long-term improvements to the patient experience. It’s also a great tool to empower clinical staff and employees to strive to deliver better outcomes. If you don’t formally collect and measure these results with a survey, you’re missing out on a large piece of the patient puzzle.

Measuring Patient Satisfaction

A patient satisfaction survey does just that — gathers self-reported opinions at different points during the overall healthcare experience. Surveys can be used to gauge satisfaction during a routine physician’s office visit, an unplanned trip to the ER or an extended hospital stay. The results produce quantifiable and actionable data to help improve a wide range of service points such as ease of making an appointment or wait times. Specific areas of measurement could include:

• Affordability and value of care
• Accessibility and convenience of care
• Communication of clinical staff
• Overall quality of care
• Professionalism of clinical staff

How Patient Surveys Work

Surveys are generally organized into a collection or set of questions to gather solicited customer information. A patient satisfaction survey is no different; though focused specifically on assessing medical care and service, and preferably in a relatively concise, brief format. They can be administered anytime during the visit (or post-visit period) using physical documents, text messages, emails, landing pages, POS devices, waiting-room computers, and even electronic health records (EHR).

What Does It Look Like?

While a patient satisfaction survey can be delivered in a variety of forms, they usually consist of questions rating — say from poor to excellent — the patient’s experience while in your care. They can be as short as just a few key questions or more exhaustive. Here are two sample questionnaires:

Sample 1 — Physician Visit

1. How satisfied were you with your last visit to our office?

• Very satisfied
• Somewhat satisfied
• Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
• Somewhat dissatisfied
• Very dissatisfied

2. How easy or difficult was it to schedule your appointment with us?

• Very easy
• Somewhat easy
• Neither easy no difficult
• Somewhat difficult
• Somewhat difficult
• Very difficult

3. How convenient is our office location?

• Extremely convenient
• Very convenient
• Somewhat convenient
• Not so convenient
• Not at all convenient

Sample 2 —ER Visit

1. What was the main reason why you went to the emergency room?

• Accident or injury
• New health problem
• Ongoing condition or concern

2. During your ER visit, did you receive care within 30 minutes of checking in?

• Yes
• No

3. Did the physician or nurse ask about all the medications you were taking?

• Yes
• No
• Somewhat

How Ease Can Help

When it comes to patient satisfaction surveys, our Ease application is a reliable, effective solution. The HIPAA-compliant messaging app allows physicians, hospitals, and clinical staff to send updates to patients via texts, photos, and videos. Users simply download the app for free from the App Store or Google Play.

However, Ease excels at measuring patient — and family or caregiver — satisfaction by delivering real-time, customizable surveys to a user’s mobile device, 24/7. The 256-bit encryption offers online banking-level security, ensuring trust while keeping your patients safe. This electronically collected data is invaluable for process improvement and service recovery throughout a patient’s visit or overall healthcare journey.

Real-Time Surveys

Being able to measure and demonstrate the value of a physicians group, hospital, or healthcare provider is extremely important. Using the Ease app, patient feedback can be quickly analyzed in real-time, allowing service adjustments to be made immediately. That means nearly every patient or caregiver experience — whether one-off emergency trip, extended ICU stay, or routine annual physical — can be easily quantified for constant improvement.

A satisfaction survey is indeed an important piece of the patient puzzle. Capturing this data provides a definitive metric to monitor where your healthcare team is exceeding expectations and where they’re underperforming. Of course, the overarching goal is constant improvement for a better, more consistent patient experience.