Capturing patients’ voices to inform care is a vital part of the clinical workflow. However, most organisations miss moments when timely insights from patients can deliver a significant return on investment (ROI).
In this blog, we explore how recent innovations in patient feedback and engagement models capture and utilise these critical moments from patients in real-time – empowering care teams to personalise care for individual patients and improve experiences and clinical outcomes for all.
The Strategic Value of Feedback
Stepping outside the health sector, it’s interesting to think about why some of the biggest companies in the world—such as Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Harley Davison—call themselves ‘Customer Experience’ companies. They do this because strong evidence links excellent customer experiences to competitive advantage and long-term financial success.
Within healthcare, the ROI for hospital leaders is even more pertinent. Evidence has shown that hospitals that capture and actively improve patient experiences and outcomes (PREMs and PROMs) have:
- Stronger revenue growth and higher gross margins.
- Enhanced reputations and referral business.
- Resilient relationships with funders.
- Improved performance in clinical quality indicators.
- Fewer unplanned readmissions.
- Higher staff retention and lower recruitment costs.
- Fewer patient complaints.
- Greater profitability.
Enhancing patient centricity across the continuum of care can deliver significant strategic benefits. Let’s explore how.
The Opportunity for Innovation
The most common feedback methods in private hospitals are restricted to a single touch point, normally post-discharge. They are often based on a Net Promoter Score-type question with limited intrinsic experience measures or qualitative feedback.
While this is a critical feedback moment to drive referral business and measure overall experience, it is a very high-level measure of care experience. In a medical metaphor, it measures the temperature without truly understanding the symptoms or the cause.
Other essential elements critical to the patient experience journey are glanced over. What opportunities are there to improve the pre-admission experience? Can we help a patient through a poor interaction while in the hospital?
With recent innovations, reaching patients at home is easier and more accessible than ever before. Specialised digital tools designed to ask the right questions at the right time can proactively manage patient care. For example, private healthcare providers use real-time feedback and insights to capture a patient’s health outcome before treatment, assess surgical site infections post-discharge, and enhance medication adherence throughout recovery. These organisations are making considerable differences in operational efficiency and clinical outcomes for cost-effective enhancements to their feedback mechanisms.
What good are digital feedback tools for people like my Dad, who doesn’t even own a smartphone?
This is a true example. My 84-year-old father is happily digitally illiterate. For many working in healthcare, this has been a typical sticking point: the ability to roll out more comprehensive digital feedback options for patients like my father.
However, the underlying data today no longer supports the idea that older patients cannot participate through digital means. Paper surveys, phone surveys, and even standing kiosks at discharge are not fit for purpose. They don’t work, they don’t scale and are expensive.
Cemplicity only works in healthcare, so we know how, where and when patients engage with technology, and this is particularly true in the older community. While the over 80’s are slightly underrepresented in our collection statistics, every other age group has been shown to engage with digital methods of communication if it is presented in the right way to them. In fact, globally, our highest response rates are from the 65-80 age group!
Ongoing innovations in technology integration with messaging platforms allow you to reach patients in the way that best suits them. Our data shows that email is most effective in the over 65s, SMS for the middle-aged (that includes me), and WhatsApp for younger patients, for instance. If your patients engage with your feedback tools digitally, you can alert relevant care teams for continuous improvement. This is a massive benefit to personalising care, being more proactive for your patients, and engaging staff in the feedback. One of the most powerful tools to fulfil frontline staff is relevant and timely feedback. It fills their cup and improves morale and motivation. Happy patients deliver happier staff.
New touchpoints for innovation
The growing trend from simple post-discharge touch points to a comprehensive patient feedback mechanism can begin with some easy wins. Take the discharge process, for example. The discharge experience across many private hospitals is often one of the lowest ratings from patients when questioned about their care journey.
Many private hospitals have taken the opportunity to quickly ask patients about discharge readiness, specifically so they can make informed changes at this critical moment. A patient who leaves the hospital in a better frame of mind is more likely to adhere to treatment, recover well, and talk about their experience more positively.
These hospitals have improved their overall NPS, referral business, and patients’ active engagement with their care team once they get home.
Service Recovery
Our research shows that many easily solved issues in patient experience occurred while the patient was admitted to the hospital. Why not take the opportunity to fix those issues while the patient is still there? This area is increasingly known as “Service Recovery,” and with the general acceptance of QR Codes and ‘intelligent weblinks’, creates an agile feedback loop that creates more robust experience and outcome ratings post-discharge.
Automated integration with electronic health records makes these new touchpoints even more seamless. The use of more API-related integrations and a conscious effort from technology vendors to build ‘out-of-the-box’ type interoperability make it much easier to deploy these patient-focused solutions.
Conclusions
Leaders in private healthcare are under pressure to maintain and grow the business. This is coming with simultaneous external pressures such as funding that doesn’t align with rising costs, the challenges to attract and retain staff, and the increasing cost-of-living facing patients.
Collecting and acting on patient feedback is a cost-effective approach to enhancing operational efficiency, staff engagement, and patient experience and outcomes in private hospitals. To facilitate these goals and mitigate the risks, consider digital feedback initiatives a strategic priority. The clinical, cultural, and commercial benefits are significant, and the cost to deploy is relatively modest.
Let’s envision a future where every patient’s voice shapes better healthcare, leading to better patient outcomes, more efficient operations and a motivated, engaged staff.