The importance of feedback
in patient experience

Enhancing the patient journey experience through effective patient feedback.

Are you confident that your patient feedback system is truly enhancing the patient journey experience? Relying on guesswork and superficial data is insufficient when it comes to understanding patient satisfaction. This is where patient experience surveys and feedback systems play a crucial role. They provide invaluable insights into what patients think about the healthcare services they receive, highlighting both strengths and areas for improvement

However, there's a significant challenge to consider.
Often, feedback is presented in verbal or written reports to hospital boards. While these boards discuss standard medical practices and policies, they also dedicate considerable time to reviewing patient satisfaction and quality of care.

Unfortunately, this approach tends to remain theoretical, failing to translate into actionable, patient-centric care that genuinely enhances the quality of services provided.
Although some studies include data on patient experience, they often fall short of demonstrating how effectively this data is utilized to improve care quality. While hospital boards prioritize quality oversight, evidence suggests that regular discussions on this topic correlate positively with improved care. Yet, the actual use of patient feedback to influence quality remains unclear.

So how does "Feedback" function within the firstpass platform? Feedback serves as a quantifiable measure of patient satisfaction regarding specific hospital functions. Patients may express dissatisfaction with their doctor's response or commend the front office staff's service.

Additionally, long wait times can significantly impact patient satisfaction, a topic we explore further in our blog on the financial implications of wait times. You can read all about it by clicking: why wait times can seriously cost you your bottomline.

firstpass enables hospitals to configure feedback forms at various points throughout a patient's visit, triggering them in real-time as needed. These forms can be embedded in mobile apps, websites, or sent via SMS to collect patient input on specific services.

For instance, if a patient communicates through a mobile app, they will receive a notification prompting them to provide feedback via a simple form.

The power of "multi-channel flexibility" firstpass excels in gathering data from multiple channels, including mobile apps, kiosks with QR codes, websites, online chat, and social media. This comprehensive approach allows hospitals to gauge patient satisfaction levels throughout the entire visit.

For example, feedback collected via social media may pertain to a call center handling appointment requests, while feedback from the mobile app could relate to a specific treatment received at the facility.

How firstpass gathers feedback to enhance patient satisfaction firstpass doesn't just collect feedback; it weaves a coherent narrative of the patient experience. By intelligently processing feedback from various channels, firstpass provides hospitals with holistic feedback.

feedback benefits you in two key ways:

  • Using firstpass, hospitals can trigger feedback in real-time while the patient is in the facility and with the option to push feedback to be filled at a later date as well.
  • Real-time feedback helps to know the patient's experience at every step of the journey. In the event patient satisfaction is low, firstpass triggers alert notifications to the relevant staff to address such a situation immediately.

Here's how a Feedback form with its features looks like:

Using different types of feedback forms No hospital can measure the patient experience index with a single feedback form. The need of every type of service differs, and so would the feedback.
For instance, the NPS (Net Promoter Score) cannot be defined for obtaining feedback at the registration desk of health services, but is applicable for a doctor, department or hospital. Similarly, feedback and patient reports on the politeness of a clerk or the quality of a transaction time, could be sent to every patient.
firstpass allows hospital administrators to create and publish different types of feedback forms for different services.
Get to know more about how it all works with our feedback module.

Sentiment Analysis with firstpass Most often, feedback systems are just provided with scoring which may not reflect the real happiness or satisfaction levels of the patients. However, firstpass is the world's first patient experience platform to have real-time feedback and sentiment analysis.

What is Sentiment Analysis? Sentiment analysis is a technique that’s largely used as a mainstream approach to help code customer feedback. Sentiment analysis algorithms help you make sense of your feedback responses by coding responses based on the number of positive and negative words used.

What makes sentiment analysis more valuable than other analyses? Thanks to the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP), data analysts can categorize customer feedback as either positive or negative through their natural language. With the right medium of capturing sentiment analysis for customer feedback, product marketing companies can gain deeper insights into customer opinion while boosting their sales and revenues.

The Patient Centered Approach (PCA), has become a critical component in the development and enhancement of health services and factors relating to improving patient satisfaction. It values the important inputs of medical consumers in order to develop and create better levels of healthcare services that improve the experience of patients and consumers alike.

Meanwhile, a thorough analyses of patient online reviews showed that the majority of responses were positive. An in-depth study using supervised learning discovered that patients who received a positive rating in their health grades had a shorter wait time and there was sufficient patient engagement. A similar study discovered that although empathy, friendliness, and explanation are often mentioned as positive sentiments, negative comments showed concerns regarding appointment access, appointment wait times, and time spent with a physician.

AI-driven algorithm for efficient forecasting of care loads and in-flow The conventional process that’s followed in a patient journey generally involves fixing an appointment, visiting the clinic/ facility, checking-in and validating the health insurance, checking vitals, consulting with the doctor, and/or visiting the pharmacy to benefit from the services at the laboratory or the radiology departments.

The way it’s normally routed is through a queue management system by which many healthcare providers operate the inflow of patients. The combination of data procured from queue management and EMR, can be of great use to improve the patient experience.

The data-set obtained from Queue Management, EMR, the pharmacy system, the laboratory, the wait-time in-service delivery locations, care-time, transit-time between service delivery locations, as well as the journey-time, are all analysed to derive a pattern. When applied with Artificial Intelligence algorithms, it unlocks data-sets that can have a profound positive impact on the improvement of the patient experience.

Predictive modeling of healthcare is a proactive step towards identifying patients at risk of disease or adverse outcomes. One of the most common AI predictive models is the patient's inflow into the emergency department; re-admissions into emergency departments; disease or other outcomes; and in-patient mortality.

Artificial Intelligence can be used to forecast patient flow and avoid unnecessary trips to the emergency department. Rapid interpretation of clinical data would enable segregating patients to predict outcomes in the emergency department operations. Consequently, AI can directly influence the efficient utilization of resources, cost and time; and quality of patient care.

To know more about the capabilities of firstpass beyond benefits like feedback, sentiment analysis or forecasting, and how it can harness the collective power of its modules to help you, visit:www.vectramind.com/#/firstpass

This blog has been edited and repurposed here for the purposes of information on patient feedback and firstpass. It includes excerpts from a paper by:

Balagopal Ramdurai

CTO, Products & Innovation, Vectramind Corporation