How to Implement a Successful Patient Feedback System: Best Practices and Strategies

In today's competitive healthcare landscape, patient loyalty is far from guaranteed. As the Harvard Business Review put it, “patients in the United States aren’t loyal customers.” They seek care from multiple sources, change allegiance frequently, and rarely acquire the degree of brand loyalty typical of leading businesses in other industries. To stand out, top-performing healthcare organizations are harnessing the power of modern patient feedback systems. These systems allow providers to gather real-time insights, measure patient satisfaction, identify pain points, and ultimately build stronger, more lasting relationships with their patients. 

To put that in perspective, while nearly half of all Americans subscribe to Amazon Prime, the largest healthcare companies in the country only provide care for around 1% of people. While consumer expectations in these industries are wildly different, healthcare providers can learn from how a consumer-forward company like Amazon manages its customers’ expectations with real-time feedback systems and multichannel insights.

Many of the unique challenges facing healthcare providers can be mitigated with a patient feedback system that mirrors successful businesses in other industries. In this article, we explore the strengths and weaknesses of current patient feedback methodologies to present data-driven feedback strategies that better match the goals of modern healthcare providers. With a patient feedback system like Macorva’s Radiant AI^® for PX, organizations can leverage cutting-edge feedback strategies to increase patient satisfaction and loyalty, improve engagement, and raise their HCAHPS scores.

Assessing Current Feedback Processes

Current feedback processes in healthcare rely on manual patient feedback collection from numerous channels, including:

• Patient feedback surveys
• Comment cards
• Online reviews
• Website/app operational data
• Customer support interactions
• Email survey responses
• Telephone surveys
• Patient interviews
• Focus groups

There are advantages to this tried and true feedback system. When patients interact with emails and apps, they feel they have a voice in your organization. By using a website, app, and social media account in tandem, healthcare providers can offer a multi-channel feedback system that promotes brand engagement while doubling as positive advertising.

However, this system also comes with flaws. Patient feedback collected and combined from multiple sources can lead to false conclusions if not supported by advanced feedback analysis software. For example, personnel manually identifying patterns in feedback data may not be able to discern an issue related to the quality of a service from one related to the quality of a certain provider. They may miss valuable patient insights altogether because they don’t have all the information.

While patient satisfaction and loyalty in the healthcare industry appears to be governed by different preferences compared to brand loyalty in companies like Amazon, advanced patient feedback software can help healthcare providers seeking better ways to engage and retain their patients. By gathering real-time feedback, automatically categorizing it, and providing automated, customizable reports, healthcare providers gain valuable insights into patient needs and expectations. This allows them to tailor their services, improve the patient experience, and ultimately enhance loyalty.

Choosing the Right Feedback Channels

Before deploying patient feedback software, healthcare organizations should examine their feedback channels to ensure they’re not leaving any stone unturned. Nearly 3 in 4 patients report that they will only consider providers with at least a 4/5 rating on high-traffic review sites like Google and WebMD. Therefore, balancing traditional feedback methods with a strong digital presence is key to successful patient engagement. 

The first goal of feedback is to make it as easy as possible for patients to access your company’s reporting tools and voice their opinions. In addition to the sources previously mentioned, consider these feedback channels, which go underutilized in many traditional healthcare organizations:

• In-person feedback via tablets deployed at kiosks
• Automated text-based feedback systems
• Social media surveys
• Website or in-app surveys

Recent studies show that 77% of consumers use at least two sites when deciding to support a business. The goal of utilizing multiple feedback channels is to present feedback in the form most likely to be engaged with by modern consumers. It’s a tactic used by almost every consumer-facing brand with an online presence but remains underused in the healthcare industry.

Designing Effective Surveys

Even businesses that successfully deploy feedback using a balanced multi-channel approach might notice a lack of engagement in their patient surveys. This is the next pitfall that healthcare organizations need to tackle by designing surveys that patients will want to utilize honestly.

To design effective patient feedback surveys, consider these strategies as a starting point for turning patient experiences into feedback-driven improvement:

• Stay focused and concise: Center your surveys on the patient experience using concise language that communicates each question’s goal as clearly as possible.
• Use unbiased language: Avoid survey language that manipulates patients’ answers as this can cause feedback analysis issues and negative brand perception.
• Provide open-ended questions: Allow patients to freely express their concerns to discover more detailed trends in their experiences.
• Ensure patient feedback is validated: Enforce patient validation prior to feedback to avoid unsolicited or unverified responses.
• Ask for patient input: Patients and their families may be able to provide insight into your feedback strategies simply by incorporating their preferences into your surveys.

By focusing on clarity, avoiding bias, including open-ended questions, validating responses, and incorporating patient input, healthcare organizations can turn patient experiences into meaningful improvements. This approach ensures better patient engagement and ultimately enhances the quality of care. 

Building a Dedicated Feedback Team

While many healthcare businesses know the importance of patient feedback, many still treat their feedback workflow as an afterthought. Consider that 88% of consumers prefer to use a business that responds to all reviews. This is why top-performing organizations appoint a dedicated feedback manager to oversee the program and ensure timely responses to customer reactions.

The best patient feedback system utilizes staff from different departments to create a multi-faceted management workflow that prioritizes the patient experience. This workflow should be similar to those used in consumer-oriented businesses to market products and improve brand engagement but reworked for the purpose of collecting and utilizing patient insights.

As with brand engagement teams, feedback management teams require leadership buy-in to function productively. This means that healthcare businesses need to prioritize morale and engagement when supporting their teams. This could include:

• Providing employee training to guide responses to feedback
• Utilizing performance management software to increase employee engagement
• Deploying automated employee feedback tools to give employees a voice
• Utilize data-driven approaches when communicating the company’s vision
• Hire external consultants to validate your company’s values with external proof

Promoting the Feedback Program

Promoting a feedback program requires outreach both internally and externally. Internally, employees need to be educated on the importance of patient feedback in improving the patient experience. Externally, patients need to be engaged in the feedback process to participate in it. AI-driven patient feedback solutions like Macorva PX can help organizations achieve both goals:

Internal Outreach: Advanced feedback software can provide actionable recommendations for each department’s workflow, helping team leaders set clear goals for patient feedback improvements. By integrating feedback data into performance reviews and development plans, employees can see the direct impact of patient feedback on their work and understand the importance of continuous improvement.

External Outreach: Automated multi-channel feedback software can distribute engaging and easy-to-complete surveys to patients across various platforms, such as email, SMS, and patient portals.

Advanced AI systems can tailor these surveys to be more interactive and personalized, enhancing patient engagement. Clear communication about how their feedback will be used to improve services builds trust, while incentives such as discounts on future services further motivate patients to participate.

By leveraging technology with these features, healthcare organizations can effectively promote their feedback programs, improving patient engagement and continuously enhancing the quality of care.

Collecting and Analyzing Data

Centralizing feedback data from multiple sources into one easily accessible hub has wide-reaching implications for healthcare providers. This data centralization supports an integrated care approach, which can significantly enhance patient satisfaction and improve regulatory compliance scores, including HCAHPS and CAHPS.  

Integrated care allows team leaders to coordinate patient care around the patient’s needs by consolidating data between multiple sources.This includes information from various departments, different conditions, and multiple providers. In conventional healthcare data analysis, these care histories are often segmented by specialization, which can hinder comprehensive care coordination.

To improve data analytics in healthcare, top-performing organizations track feedback metrics across disciplines, conditions, and providers to create a more unified profile for each patient. This allows administrators to identify the trends in a patient’s care that impacted their experience and improve their services accordingly.

With a global view of patient insights, healthcare providers with an integrated care approach can incorporate the patient’s stories and comments into their workflows. This requires patient feedback software capable of streamlining feedback metrics into actionable analytics that can be used and shared between providers.

Responding to Feedback

Patient feedback software allows healthcare providers to seamlessly collect and respond to feedback in real time. From a customer service angle, this capability allows for more efficient resolution of patient complaints and concerns. An effective patient feedback system can help providers develop protocols that make patients feel heard while sharing their positive feedback with staff.

Healthcare providers must encourage open communication between providers, patients, and other providers who are integrated into that patient’s care plan. The HCAHPS survey assesses  how well your organization communicates within your network, including how often staff explains treatment details, inform patients of possible side effects, and provide information about post-care options.

An effective patient feedback system centralizes patient responses to identify gaps in a provider’s communication strategy. By pinpointing where communication is breaking down—whether in specific departments, with particular patients, or among certain personnel— providers can refine communication training and feedback requests to better engage both patients and providers.

Follow-up calls or surveys allow healthcare providers to gather even more information, which can be processed into actionable feedback development plans by an AI-enabled patient feedback system like Mavorva PX.

Using Patient Feedback for Improvement

In addition to improving the efficiency of a provider’s services, an effective feedback response also boosts a provider’s HCAHPS and CAHPS scores. A successful patient feedback system relies on communication that prioritizes the patient experience. This includes clear communication about the patient’s treatment, the information they received, and the changes made to their provider’s policies as a result of feedback.

Armed with the data-driven results of patient feedback initiatives, providers can discuss positive and negative feedback with staff in concrete terms. Identifying which departments are creating communication bottlenecks allows providers to adjust their tactics to improve patient satisfaction and loyalty where it's needed most.

This could entail getting patients more involved in developing action plans for improving your patient feedback system. Use surveys to ask clearly and concisely how the experience could be improved, what information the patient received, and how they were treated while receiving your services. Keeping questions direct allows the patient feedback software to monitor the impact that policy changes make on future feedback and continue refining the gathering process.

Top-performing providers respond to feedback with patient-centric education on everything from the patient’s medication to their follow-up plans. When patients understand your services better, they feel involved in their treatment. Feedback-driven improvement means using feedback data to keep patients informed about their care and equipped with the tools they need to continue informing your staff about their experiences.

Promoting a Culture of Feedback

Encouraging team leaders to value patient perspectives as opportunities for growth is crucial.The best patient feedback systems turn provider-to-patient communication into a culture of continuous learning, where publicly shared feedback performance metrics are used to develop actionable strategies.

This begins with training new staff on your patient feedback program, including learning the ins and outs of your patient feedback software. Your team leaders should know the value of publicly reporting patient feedback information as well as your organization’s standard for collecting and analyzing it. They can pass this information to new staff members to help advise them on how effective feedback improves your HCAHPS scores and increases loyalty among patients.

Encourage staff to proactively ask patients for feedback so that patients always feel heard. This may allow staff members to close communication gaps before they become negative feedback. Teach them to recognize the differences between positive and negative feedback by restructuring the concepts as constructive and affirmative.

• Constructive feedback identifies areas for improvement, which patients will communicate when they feel they lack vital information, did not receive care that met their initial expectations, or felt left behind by a lack of post-care. 
• Affirmative feedback reinforces the actions taken by the provider that make the patient feel informed, safe, and valued.

When sharing this feedback with staff members, focus on the specific, actionable results of the patients’ experiences. Find as many reasons to acknowledge achievements as opportunities to foster growth. Define clear objectives for interpretation moving forward and leverage patient feedback tools as ways for staff members to turn the patient experience into opportunities to upskill in their services.

Overcoming Common Challenges

Healthcare providers face challenges with resource management, response rate, and fatigue when optimizing their feedback for a patient-centric approach. Often, staff members prove resistant to paradigm shifts in feedback collection processes. Their teams may catch on to this lack of enthusiasm and feel disengaged from the patient experience as a result.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the feedback system, patients may be slow to respond to feedback requests or do so unenthusiastically due to unoptimized surveys. Many healthcare providers know the value of candid feedback but lack the tools to promote the engagement that enables it.

For example, providers commonly lack ways to easily integrate EHR and HRIS systems with the feedback collected from real-time patient surveys. Macorva PX centralizes patient insights to help providers respond quickly to specific patient concerns and deploy new strategies based on the software’s recommendations. With an integrated feedback data system, providers can make patients feel heard by relating their feedback to recent care and making directive improvements based on their experiences.

Just as loyal customers need to be engaged, healthcare patients rely on a continuous flow of information to feel engaged in their treatment. This begins with a patient feedback system that gathers candid feedback and equips staff with modern tools to drive improvements based on these insights.

Conclusion

Macorva’s PX solution bridges the gap in a patient-to-provider feedback system to seamlessly engage both parties in a culture of continuous feedback. Our patient feedback software analyzes and categorizes insights by staff members and providers, translating them into actionable recommendations optimized to enhance the patient experience. Staff members will be more likely to engage with patient insights when they are translated into relevant strategies that help them advance in their fields while also improving the HCAHPS scores of their organization in the process.

Seamless implementation requires an adjustment period, including additional staff training on new standards for feedback-driven improvement. A centralized feedback system enables providers to continually prioritize patient feedback as a key metric for measuring success. The future of patient feedback will undoubtedly see further advances in AI-enabled reporting and custom analytics. Healthcare organizations that lack a versatile digital feedback infrastructure will fall behind, while those embracing continuous feedback will excel, becoming the preferred choice of patients for years to come. 

Learn how healthcare organizations are using Macorva PX to enhance patient satisfaction and improve operational efficiency. Read the overview or contact us today to get started.