For many reasons, healthcare clinics are a growing trend for large healthcare systems. Urgent care centers and other retail clinic settings have become a major market as consumers seek convenience and more access options.
With the volume of patients flocking to clinic-like healthcare delivery settings, there lies a tremendous opportunity for healthcare systems to capture valuable consumer data. The best way to maximize both the collection and use of this data is through automated healthcare surveys.
Automated healthcare surveys for clinics – especially clinics that are part of a larger healthcare system or those that have several locations – offer many benefits. Here are just a few:
Quickly Isolate Issues
If you have multi-site clinics as part of a larger system, automated healthcare surveys can quickly isolate any issues at one or more location. For example, if your automated patient survey identifies that patients are not happy with the scheduling system or are waiting too long for their appointments across all locations, you have quickly isolated a system-wide problem that needs a widespread operational change. If your automated survey data shows that only one clinic site is having such reports, then you know the issue is isolated to only one clinic site and needs to be addressed on a smaller scale.
Service Recovery
In the highly competitive healthcare marketplace, organizations simply don’t have time to wait on traditional survey delivery and collection methods. If a patient leaves a clinic after an appointment and electronically receives a survey within minutes of leaving his/her appointment with reminder prompts to complete the survey, he/she is more likely to fill it out and deliver timely data that is then automatically evaluated and delivered to the applicable decision makers, who can take that data and act quickly in a service recovery situation.
For example, a patient leaves an urgent care facility after an appointment and receives an automated healthcare survey by email. He quickly completes it from his mobile phone and reports that he was not happy with the cleanliness of the clinic; the restrooms were not clean and he saw dirt on the floor in the exam room. This information is immediately sent to the appropriate authority at the clinic and addressed with a cleaning crew. The patient who reported the issue is then contacted with an apology and update that his issue has been addressed. Now, it is more likely that this patient will tell his friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues about the quick service recovery, and not a more negative plight urging them not to go to the clinic.
Operational Efficiencies
Automated healthcare surveys offer a level of consistency that provides a highly insightful and valuable dataset over time. In addition to reducing personnel workload, a correctly automated solution:
- Collects fresh information from a large data set;
- Collects and delivers data at an enhanced speed;
- Provides extreme ease-of-administration and consistency over time; and
- Saves clinics and their larger systems money.
In addition, the data collected will help a clinic or system of clinics evaluate their current operations to identify specific challenges or areas in need of workflow improvement. If patients are consistently complaining that they are not receiving appointment reminders, then that can be quickly remedied. It’s well known that appointment reminders will increase the rate at which patients will keep and attend their appointments, which increases clinic productivity. Automated surveys help clinics to identify such operational issues early, before they become cost prohibitive and deeper-rooted organizational problems that are harder to fix.
In sum, automated healthcare surveys can help clinics and their larger systems in a multitude of ways. From a customer service and service delivery point of view, automated surveys are the best way to find and remedy issues promptly. From an economical point of view, automated surveys provide the most efficient and effective way to make system wide operational improvements that also boost the organization’s bottom line.