The patient experience is everything. Evidence shows that when patients are satisfied with their hospital experience they will return for more. Patient experiences influence the hospital’s reputation, which affects more than just the patient’s individual experience; reputation influences community and public opinion, which can have even greater impacts on hospital utilization.
Basically, the chain of events is as follows: patient experience drives reputation, which drives utilization, which drives retention. Hospitals must take the evaluation of the patient experience seriously because that’s where it all starts.
This is why automated healthcare surveys for hospitals are so influential. While most hospitals have always implemented some form of quality assessment and/or patient experience surveys, automated healthcare surveys for hospitals offer efficient, effective and scalable patient outreach while conserving resources and budgets.
How Automated Healthcare Surveys Work
With the sheer volume of patients that hospitals provide services to on a daily basis, automated healthcare surveys free up an extreme amount of resources by employing, collecting, and analyzing surveys automatically. Automated surveys can be delivered through many channels, including:
- Voice
- SMS
- Social Media
Benefits of Automated Health Surveys
Automated Health Surveys provide hospital systems with a multitude of benefits, but the highlights are that they:
- Are more economical over time, as they save dollars that would have been spent on mail/postage, or live agent/nurses taking surveys via phone.
- Have the flexibility to reach large numbers of people quickly while decreasing and freeing up call center/customer service staff for more productive work.
- Provide real-time delivery notification and reporting to view survey results instantly, which can be used to efficiently identify and address service recovery issues.
- Gather sophisticated data for health management programs.
- Offer heightened privacy and security in accordance with HIPAA and other regulatory compliance responsibilities.
- Can integrate with electronic health record technology and other hospital systems/databases.
- Can be administered outside of business hours when customers may be better reached.
In addition to use post-utilization of care, automated healthcare surveys for hospitals can be used for patient intake. For example, prior to a patient’s appointment, a health risk assessment or health history can be automatically distributed and inputted into an electronic system. This decreases data input time spent on the date of service and also delivers a more streamlined patient care experience.
Why Automated Healthcare Surveys for Hospitals are Worth The Investment
Knowing that patient experience is everything, automated healthcare surveys help hospitals garner the most important information necessary for their future success by gathering data that can be rapidly analyzed and applied to make service improvements where necessary. Automated patient communications, including surveys and assessments, also help hospitals understand how to steer communication preferences to better reach and engage patients.
Better survey participation rates mean more important patient experience data being reported, which as we know, influences reputation and utilization. For hospitals’ bottom lines, automated surveys prove to offer a ROI in the long run. With Surgent Networks you can leverage your healthcare provider patient base so you can get the most data to make better business and customer service decisions. Learn more about how Surgent can help your organization with automated healthcare surveys.