Patient Satisfaction: A Non-Financial Metric which can significantly impact Financial Outcomes

Objectives

The management believed that having absolute clarity in its consumption patterns for delivering its clinical services would serve as the foundation for consistency in clinical care, high efficiency in delivering its services and uniformity in pricing. Outcomes

Our solution – The solution considered business perspective in terms of efficiency and the clinical perspective in terms of effectiveness of a treatment plan in developing a comprehensive solution. With a well-structured representation of appropriately designed metrics the solution could instantly help the stakeholders deduce potential areas of improvement.

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A leading tertiary hospital chain improves its Net Promoter Score (NPS) from 33 to 80 within 18 months by addressing patient voices. For any business, one of the most important metrics that require tracking is Customer Satisfaction. This metric is vital especially in the Service sector like hospitals as doctors and health staff work closely with the patient and feedback can help improve the overall experience. A higher satisfaction rate leads to better clinical and patient loyalty, thereby improving the morale of customers as well as the employees. This, in turn, helps the hospital achieve its financial goals.

Challenges of gaining insights from manual legacy systems

Historically, each of the 30+ healthcare facilities under this large health network created their own system of seeking patient feedback. Their systems were based on manually collecting patient feedback on a piece of paper at the time of their physical discharge and evaluating them weeks later.

As expected, the legacy system had major issues with data gathering and assimilation. While the feedback rating scales were disorganized, each hospital was assigning priorities to disparate metrics. Some hospitals were not measuring feedback on patient interactions with hospital personnel whereas other hospitals were. The central team sitting at the headquarters seldom received structured information about the feedback scores.

The biggest bottleneck for Operations was the processing of this valuable feedback data to bring out any meaningful analysis and take corrective actions.

Before Creating ‘Great Analysis’, Ensure your Systems carry ‘Great Data’

When our team consulted with the hospital management and developed a dashboard for the patient feedback system of one of their hospitals, they realized the value of capturing data in structured formats. Immediately, the management teams set up a standard questionnaire format and took control of the data capturing methodology from their headquarters. Also, instead of collecting feedback at the time of discharge, now a list of discharged patients was shared with the Central Call Center team and executives called the patients post-discharge. Collecting data a few days after the discharge also helped them remove any sort of bias that patients may carry at the time of discharge.

With all the hospitals now on-board with a single and simple cloud-based system for patient feedback collection, we could run the dashboard the centralized data points and provide comprehensive analysis. Starting from comparing hospital units in feedback scores, highlighting under-performing areas within a hospital to identifying areas that immediately required interventions, our analysis dashboards could throw insights into all aspects of patient perception. This led to a broader action and push towards achieving better satisfaction scores across the board.

Diligently Tracking a Metric is a Key Ingredient for Better Performance

A dedicated team now reviews every feedback entry in detail and responds in a timely manner.

By addressing the needs of patients as highlighted by the feedback system, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) for the health network had gone up to 80 in March 2019 from the initial value of 33 at the time of system introduction in September 2017.

During the reported period, the healthcare group had also witnessed a considerable improvement in patient footfalls and revenues.