How to improve patient satisfaction and maintain service-excellence in Medical Centers.

2019-08-14

There is no market of any kind, which has been staying constant for years and even months. The same statement is true for the medical field. Today’s patients have plenty of choices for their care. New clinics and medical centers are opening, competition is growing and in order to keep being or become the first choice for the people, the healthcare provider has to ensure it is taking a proper service-excellence approach. But what elements are the most important in it for your patients?

What makes people choose one medical center instead of another?

Well, actually we can’t answer for them. As we like to say, the first step for improving something is measuring. Who else, but the doctors would understand that? In the medical field the first stage is the testing and then, according to the received results, the proper treatment follows. The same approach is true for the patient satisfaction. At first you ask questions, then you analyze the received answers and finally pick up the right medicine. Neither of the steps should be skipped or underestimated.

How to determine aspects influencing the patient satisfaction mostly?

Here’s the small life example from the practice of one of our clients. Clinic had certain problems in the department of Otolaryngology. Low score of patient satisfaction proved it. When the manager asked the leading staff on what they thought was the major reason of the existing dissatisfaction among people, the answer was, “It’s surely the long waiting time”. At first it seemed quite logical, but before making any major changes into the working process, manager asked the market research company Examinare to make a deeper investigation in order to confirm or deny the guess-work and develop an optimal method of minimizing the problem. 

The further investigation surprised everyone. According to the clinic’s patients, long waiting time wasn’t of any concern for them. What they considered really important or lacking were caring, proper listening, sufficient explanation and communication. Thus, such an unexpected result turned the patient-centric work into the opposite direction, the one, which no one even assumed before the research. The positive effect was not long in coming.

What is the best service-excellence strategy for the medical center?

There is no other way to improve the patient experience in your medical center than to put patients at the top of the list. Even though the management may consider certain aspects valuable and prioritized, it’s the patients, who judge the services based on their own quality measures. As the above example showed, the quality criteria of medical center staff and its customers can differ drastically.

An optimal way to track patient satisfaction with minimal staff involvement.

Let’s say you want to continuously check the perception of the service level and ensure that the patients are satisfied, but your medical center is not ready to spend the impressive amounts of money on investigations of the research companies. In this case Clinic Evaluator would be the most cost-efficient and seamlessly working solution, collecting, analyzing and delivering the valuable data whenever you need it.

It is based on Examinare Survey Tool, but is built according to the needs of the medical field. Survey sending can be connected to you patient’s visit or any other event and be sent automatically, semi-automatically or manually depending on your goals. You can conduct annual, monthly patient satisfaction checks or even organize a satisfaction spot inside your medical center, where any person can share opinion based on the current visit. Our survey experts will help you to prepare an effective questionnaire or even make it for you, so that you can start working with our system without any hassle.

As soon as you are ready to track and improve patient satisfaction in your medical center, fill in Price Quotation request. Our team member will then contact you with the information on possibilities, prices and further instructions.

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