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You’ll agree that patient satisfaction surveys contribute immensely to continuous improvement (Kaizen) in the healthcare sector.
Here’s a fact.
Patient satisfaction surveys can help you identify strategies for improving your medical practice.
Insights into the data gathered can easily translate into better care and happier patients.
Microsoft Forms is one of the tools we recommend you use when gathering patient information.
Yes, you read that right.
This tool is free and easy to use. You don’t need coding skills to create an online survey form for your needs.
Let’s assume you’ve used patient satisfaction surveys to gather data.
How do you extract answers from the data?
This is where survey-based charts, such as Likert, come in.
The Likert Scale Chart has choices ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ to help you get a holistic view of people’s opinions and their level of agreement.
It’s straightforward to read and interpret a Likert Scale Chart, as you shall see later.
Microsoft Excel lacks ready-to-go and insightful Likert Scale Charts.
We’re not advising you to dispose of your Excel.
Install a particular add-in in your Excel to access ready-made Likert Scale Charts.
Before jumping into the how-to guide, we’ll address the following question: what is a patient satisfaction survey?
Definition: A patient satisfaction survey is a special type of survey you can use to collect patient feedback.
It can help you to measure patients’ satisfaction with the quality and care of the healthcare service provider.
You can calibrate your patient satisfaction survey in healthcare to investigate the following aspects, namely:
Over the past two decades, patient satisfaction surveys in healthcare have gained increasing attention as essential sources of data for:
Healthcare industries across the world are increasingly drifting towards continuous quality improvement.
This is aligned with Donabedian’s declaration for incorporating patient perception into quality assessment, which was signed during the 90s.
As a healthcare brand, you have an ethical obligation to incorporate patient-centered care in your healthcare mission and purpose.
Most healthcare managers increasingly use patient satisfaction surveys when designing quality improvement programs.
How?
They incorporate patients’ perceptions and opinions in their process design and decision-making.
In other words, they’re using the ‘patient’s first’ mantra.
Recently, most healthcare regulators worldwide shifted towards a market-driven approach to cut costs and increase efficiency.
The patient satisfaction survey for data collection and continuous optimization is at the heart of this.
Yes, this tool is helping regulators create frameworks that focus on patients’ needs. Besides, you’ll avoid guessing the needs, which will help improve quality and cut costs in the long run.
One of the regulators who started this practice early was the French government.
By the late 90s, evaluation of patient satisfaction was mandatory for all French hospitals.
The German health regulator acquired this practice in 2005 as a key quality control and improvement element.
The above implies that patient satisfaction measurement is a reliable indicator for improving the quality of services.
In the coming section, we’ll address the importance of patient satisfaction surveys in healthcare (benefits).
You don’t want to miss this.
Understanding patients’ perceptions can help build meaningful and lasting relationships.
Also, a patient satisfaction survey can help you to establish effective care journeys grounded in compassion and empathy.
You can leverage this tool to design care systems that are grounded in:
Operating without data is like shooting darts during the night.
Use patient satisfaction surveys to avoid common issues, such as patient appeasement or window dressing, that merely creates an illusion of quality.
Patient satisfaction surveys can help you learn if you’re meeting your patients’ expectations.
To compete with other medical services, we recommend you seek your patients’ views to meet their needs effectively.
Measuring patients’ perceptions of services can provide you with valuable information on which to build quality improvement programs.
Patient satisfaction surveys in healthcare can help collect critical feedback for analysis.
Check out more benefits below.
You’re sending a message that you care about patients’ experiences by asking for their perceptions and opinions.
Building trust can easily transform your facility into the hospital of choice for your patients.
Instead of assuming your healthcare organization failed to hit the mark, you’ll have objective feedback to gauge performance.
Remember, you don’t have to be the judge and jury of your performance. Let the patients decide.
After all, it’s all about your patients and their needs.
Tools like, Google and Microsoft Forms make patient satisfaction surveys in healthcare less expensive.
You don’t have to spend money. Also, you’ll save a lot of time.
Traditional methods, such as paper-filled patient satisfaction survey questions, are prone to error.
For example, the patient satisfaction survey data gathered via forms must be input into your database manually, which is time-consuming.
So, what’s the purpose of your survey?
In other words, what are you hoping to gain from the exercise?
Before putting together a patient satisfaction survey, define your goals and objectives.
Then, craft questions that are aligned with your overall objectives.
Remember to keep your questions short to pique interest. Some patients might not have the will and energy to answer all your questions.
We’ll take you through patient satisfaction survey examples and questions in the ensuing section.
Check out some of the questions you can use to create a patient satisfaction survey in healthcare.
Let’s dive in.
This question probes the satisfaction level and likelihood of referrals.
Remember, referrals will only come after your patients are satisfied with your services.
Meet their needs to expect a referral.
This question is probing the user journey experience in your healthcare funnel.
We recommend you make your journey as seamless as possible to increase bookings and physical traffic.
The first point of contact should be as accommodating as possible to inspire potential patients to complete their user journey.
The care of nurses/doctors and the professionalism of administration and other staff members influence your patients’ satisfaction.
Use this question if your goal is to uncover whether your staff is professional and empathetic to patients.
Certain services are resource-intensive, which means they’re expensive
The affordability of these care services is aligned with the insurance plans available.
In other words, only insured patients can afford specialized care. To provide comprehensive and holistic care, you need resources, which are expensive.
This cost should be passed to patients to ensure sustainability in healthcare provision.
In the coming section, we’ll show you how to export patient satisfaction survey results in Excel.
Microsoft Forms is a tested and proven app for creating patient satisfaction surveys in healthcare questions.
It’s free and easy to navigate.
This application can help you create sharable patient satisfaction surveys.
Use the Microsoft Forms application to put together surveys faster.
The patient satisfaction survey creator is ultra-flexible and easy to use. You can easily craft survey questions depending on your needs and preferences.
Microsoft Forms has a drag-and-drop capability that makes it easy to move elements around.
You can export your patient satisfaction survey responses to Excel using simple and easy-to-follow steps.
Check out more benefits below.
It can take literally minutes to get comfortable with the application.
The patient satisfaction survey creator provides an innovative way to gather your patients’ sentiments.
More so, the Microsoft Forms application is a quicker alternative to asking questions via email.
It has all the standard survey fields, such as dropdowns and multiple-choice questions.
Imagine you’ve created a Microsoft Forms survey to gather patients’ opinions about your healthcare facility.
Follow the easy steps below.
Below are the levels of the responses patients can fill in the survey.
1 = Strongly Disagree
2 = Disagree
3 = Neutral
4 = Agree
5 = Strongly Agree
In the coming section, we’ll show you how to analyze patient satisfaction survey data.
Excel is one of the spreadsheet applications you can use to store, organize, and analyze data.
But it lacks visualizations designed purposely to visualize patient satisfaction surveys in healthcare data, such as Likert Scale Chart.
We’re not advising you to do away with Excel.
There’s an add-on you can easily install in your Excel to access survey-based visualizations, such as Likert Scale Chart.
The application is called ChartExpo.
What is ChartExpo?
ChartExpo is an add-in you can easily install in your Microsoft Excel to access charts for visualizing patient satisfaction survey questions.
This section will use a Likert Chart to visualize the patient satisfaction survey responses below.
To get started with ChartExpo in Excel, follow the steps below:
From this Likert Scale Chart, you could identify how patients felt after visiting your clinic.
Your patient satisfaction survey questions should cover each of the three areas, namely:
A patient satisfaction survey is a special type of survey you can use to collect patient feedback.
It can help you to measure patients’ satisfaction with the quality and care of the healthcare service provider.
You can calibrate your patient satisfaction survey in healthcare to investigate quality and costs.
Patient satisfaction surveys can help you identify strategies for improving your medical practice.
Insights into the data gathered can easily translate into better care and happier patients.
Microsoft Forms is one of the tools we recommend you use when gathering patient information.
This tool is free and easy to use. You don’t need coding skills to create an online survey form for your needs.
Let’s assume you’ve used patient satisfaction surveys to gather data.
How do you extract answers from the data?
This is where survey-based charts, such as Likert, come in.
The chart has choices ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ to help you get a holistic view of people’s opinions and their level of agreement.
It’s straightforward to read and interpret a Likert Scale Chart, as you shall see later.
Microsoft Excel lacks ready-to-go and insightful Likert Scale Charts.
We’re not advising you to dispose of your Excel.
We recommend you install third-party apps, such as ChartExpo, to access patient satisfaction survey graphs, such as Likert Scale Chart.
ChartExpo is an Excel add-in loaded with an insightful and ready-to-go Likert Scale Chart.
Sign up for a 7-day free trial today to access ready-made Likert Scale Charts for visualizing patient satisfaction data.
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