How fallible is patient feedback?

It’s a relatively simple matter to generate feedback for a survey on patient satisfaction, is it not? Simply persuade your outpatients to fill in an online form or respond to an email questionnaire and the job’s half done. Or so you may think. In reality, generating accurate patient feedback is a more complex, labour-intensive process than simply waiting for the emails to come flooding in, but the results you generate will certainly be worth the additional effort. By capturing accurate, qualitative data from a patient’s perspective, you’ll be able to improve your working processes and patient interactions in future far more adeptly than you would otherwise, and here’s how you can do so.

Quality not quantity

If you’re looking to change your healthcare company for the better, what you really need from your patients is insight. Accurately capturing sentiment or ‘emotive’ data can be extremely challenging, but doing so can provide your company with priceless information on how the business is actually perceived. Confronting patients with a survey or an online form isn’t always the best way to generate accurate qualitative results, as depending on the phrasing of your questions and answer fields, you may have already coloured your patients’ responses before they give them. Instead, reach out to your patients using social media and other more interactive feedback methods. That way, you can use our text analytics and natural language processing software to reconstruct your qualitative data into useful, useable formats.

Individual requirements

As the saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and there’s more than one way to capture patient feedback, too. Depending on the individual patient in question, different data capture methods may work with varying degrees of success when it comes to generating accurate qualitative feedback. Some patients, for example, would be far happier to fill in a handwritten form than they would using an online version or responding to an email, while others will be just the opposite. As you’re in the healthcare profession, too, you may well be dealing with patients who aren’t capable of communicating through written means, and would prefer to give their responses verbally. You need to think about the abilities, preferences and limitations of your patients before you approach them with a specific data capture method.

Remember that here in the UK, patients are likely to be more reluctant to give out their contact details than in other parts of the world, so using on-site data capture methods may well be more successful than opting for a later response from your outpatients. Whatever data capture method you decide to use in order to generate your patient satisfaction feedback, we can provide you with a healthcare data capture solution that will provide you with the most accurate data possible as and when you need it, so contact us to arrange a free, no-obligation workshop and see what we can do in person.