30/11/2021

5 Reasons You Should Seek Patient Feedback

Obtaining customer feedback is a daily practice for businesses in various industries. Consumer brands not only optimize their products and service, but they also form bonds with their customers.  The healthcare industry can learn much from consumer brands and adopt the advantages of their customer experience feedback systems.

“Were you satisfied with our performance today? Will you recommend our practice to others? What can we do better next time?” These are questions that every good medical practice is interested in asking patients. But in everyday life, there is often a lack of time to solicit face-to-face feedback from patients and implement ideas to serve them better. Unfortunately, if a patient is not satisfied, the medical practice usually learns about it a few days later on Google Reviews. This could easily be avoided with state-of-the-art customer experience programs. In this post, we give you five reasons why you should provide your patients a platform to give you immediate feedback.

  1. Happy Patients Get Well Faster

Patients who feel that they are in good hands in a medical office, and who rate a doctor's diagnosis as competent, will recover more quickly. This is mainly because they will not question the doctor's recommendations and will precisely implement whatever is recommended to them. In contrast, a doctor who does not take their time and only listens partially is often considered by patients to be less competent.

You can go one step further in helping your patients get well faster by implementing a patient feedback program. It will make your patients feel that their opinion is important and that they are valued.

Read about Patient-Focused Care Customer Experience in the Healthcare Sector

  1. The Power of Recommendations

When choosing a practice, many patients trust the recommendations of their acquaintances, friends or work colleagues. Your best friend raves about her sensitive dentist who has state-of-the-art equipment? You are compelled to try this dentist, because after all, only the best is good enough for your own health.

When filling out a patient experience survey right after visiting a practice, patients are prompted to actively remember everything that was positive about the visit.  As a result, they remember the visit more vividly and are more likely to recommend the practice to others.

  1. One Step Ahead

In a patient experience survey that is tailored to your needs, you can not only ask your patients about positive and negative experiences, but also about their wants, needs and ideas! Sometimes an outside view brings a fresh perspective that can be implemented quickly and have a noticeable impact on patient satisfaction. How could you make your waiting room more appealing? What do patients want from the appointment process? Nobody can answer these questions better than the patients themselves.

Read how you can increase Patient Satisfaction in our prior blogpost

  1. One Feedback Channel is Better Than Many

Google Reviews, Facebook, email, telephone, appointment booking platforms. Modern medical practices must execute and manage communication on multiple channels. How practical it is when feedback can be collected via one channel. In fact, our experience has shown that patients are more likely to provide feedback on one user-friendly channel that you provide to them rather than multiple channels. This has the further positive effect that any negative feedback about your practice no longer ends up directly in social media. In addition, feedback collected can be analyzed by our artificial intelligence tools and clearly displayed in a dashboard.

One look is enough - and that leaves more time for the most important task: Working with patients.  

  1. Total Trust and Loyal Patients

When patients notice that their opinion counts, their trust in a practice is strengthened.  Patients feel pleased at the possibility that a wish they have expressed will be implemented during their next interaction.   It feels good when the doctor you trust also trusts you to give useful and fair feedback. Trust creates loyalty - that is, patients who return again and again. Our experience has proven that practices with a Patient Experience program have more loyal patient relationships than practices without such a program.

Is a Patient Experience program still missing in your practice? It can be implemented quickly and easily. Our experts would be pleased to discuss solutions with you!

 

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