Why asking for patient feedback is important

Feedback is very important regardless of the industry and work. Feedback, especially if it is of the customer, is simply priceless, and why would it not be?

A customer's feedback helps a company and its staff to know their customers and their likes and dislikes, learn, and grow. It is through customer feedback that a company knows its customers closely, learns what they want and how it can be satisfied, and grow in size and wealth.

Patient feedback can be referred to the customer feedback that is received in the medical industry, where the patients are the customers. The patients occupy a central position in the healthcare industry, which is built with the patients in mind. Therefore, it is these patients' feedback that is of utmost significance whether it is a hospital, a medical practice, or any other healthcare unit.

So, if you are associated with a medical unit or a practice, it is really important that your provider asks for feedback from each of its patients and improves the quality of the service accordingly. If it's not doing that, then it certainly can lift the overall patient satisfaction beyond measure.

Why should medical practices ask for patient feedback?

Feedback is a crucial thing, as we have discussed, especially in the medical sector. Negative feedback wrecks havoc.

One of the recent surveys pointed out that 75% of patients will choose one provider/physician over another on the basis of feedback. Therefore, feedback is certainly significant, and it directly influences the influx of patients and the overall revenue of the practices.

Here's looking at 11 prominent reasons why patient feedback is something that no practice can miss out on:

Feedback help understand the patients better

The patients are central to the patients, as we've already seen. This is why it is almost mandatory for the practices too to learn about their patients.

It is the patients who entirely rely on the medical practices they go to for their medical diseases. So, medical practices must extend the best possible services to the patients. Here, if they don't know the patients fully, then the service extended would only be half-hearted.

The feedback that the patients share, is personal and comes from their very own sense of experience. Hence, patient feedback throws light on the patient and their experience, which is ultimately very beneficial for the practices if they work on them.

It enhances the patients' experience

Much like the attrition rate of jobs in many other sectors of work, the patient attrition rate is rapidly rising too. As per recent surveys, over 36% of patients have been recorded to leave their healthcare providers in the last 2 years. One major reason for their quitting is the poor experiences they had with the providers. The lack of access and communication is some other important reason for the same.

It helps improve patient satisfaction

Patient satisfaction refers to the overall outcome of the patients. The satisfaction rating or patient satisfaction counts all of the experiences the patients had with their providers. This includes the scheduling of the appointment, access to digital software and systems, availability of patient portals, wait times, the physician and the medical care, the follow-up, and more.

Though patient satisfaction sounds like a parameter that is too vague to be touched, this satisfaction of the patients can, in fact, be measured and that can be done with the help of patient feedback. Therefore, it is important that the patient practices don't miss on asking for patient feedback.

Patient feedback helps boost credibility

Reputation and credibility are two important pillars that are responsible for the success of every company/organization. This is more so when it comes to medical units/practices.

The better the medical practices serve their patients, the more quickly comes growth. The services and facilities of the medical practices add up to the overall credibility and bring in a future era of prosperity.

It helps raise patient engagements

Recent surveys reveal more than 60% of patients want better engagement from their healthcare provider. Better patient engagements would mean an increase in the patient influx and would naturally lead to a swell in the overall revenue of the practices.

Over half of the patients surveyed indicated their preference for digital tools over the old and antiquated patient appointment booking methods and post-care follow-up. With GrowPractice, however, you can better serve the patients along with boosting their engagement rates. GrowPractice offers easy online methods of patient appointment bookings, check-ins, and intakes, along with providing a range of quick and efficient practices that are patient-centric.

It helps understand the patients' pain points

Feedback for service is actually noted down to know the difficulties of the customers so that the businesses can try and improve their services. These documents that contain feedback jot down the troubles or pains of the customers.

Similarly, the patient feedback notes down all the patients' troubles, which are shared with the management of the patient practices so that they can devise methods that would improve the services extended to the patients.

Understanding the difficulties that a single patient or a group of them are facing and improving them would ultimately lead to enhancing the overall practice services, which would empower the patients, improve the patient experience and maximize patient satisfaction. This would mean better care and quality, and an increase in patient flow.

It helps better the performance of the medical staff

Patient feedback is not only limited to certain persons, departments, or services. It can be general feedback on the practice admin or manager, the tools and services that are accessible to them, the behavior or the work that the medical staff does, and more.

The medical workers and staff working in medical practice are among the core members of the practice, whose work/services extended to the patients not only impact the patients' care but the patient feedback too. This is because the services of the medical staff are always reflected directly.

Therefore, the performance of the medical staff can directly affect the performance of the whole of the medical practice. So, if the medical workers are not performing decently or what is up to the mark for the patients, it is the patient feedback that can highlight them. This also leads to improving the performance of the medical staff too.

Patient feedback reduces patient leakages and increases retention

Patient leakages or patient leaks occur when the patients drop their preferred hospitals/medical practices and seek medical care outside of them.

According to a recent study conducted by Intuit Health, 59% of the patients who belong to the Gen Y group, might also switch their healthcare providers to embrace one with better online access.

Feedback from patients boosts the overall patient care

The quality of the patient's healthcare matters a lot. The quality of healthcare does not only help boost practice revenue and takes a particular practice ahead, but also benefits the locality, region, and country, and most importantly benefits the patients nonetheless.

The patient feedback received by the medical practices points out multiple mistakes, errors, and inconsistencies in the practice care and/or services, and ultimately helps lift the overall patient care. This goes a long way further to add to the performance and credibility of medical practices.

It helps medical practices assess the competition and perform better

In this world of startups and emerging companies, the medical sector is seeing no less competition. With regular research and development that is going on in the field of medicine, and advanced technologies, equipment, and method of care making their way, the old ones are being replaced in no time.

This fast changing way of care and the technologies used to ensure that the medical practices and healthcare units are continuously updated to the latest ones or they might fall back.

Patient feedback can serve as an important tool for medical practices to check with the ongoing competition that surrounds them. The feedback received from patients, which highlights the drawbacks of the practices, also brings room for the practices to update their services to be at par with the competition outside.

Asking for more patient feedback mostly helps reduce negative feedback

Negative feedback received by any company forms an indelible mark on their reputation of them. This negativity in the feedback can be overlooked with more positive feedback. This is exactly why most practices should go on asking for more patient feedback, which would thus increase the total number of feedback and also maximize the chances of getting more positive feedback.

Easy Ways of Asking for Patient Feedback

Practices are always on the lookout of easy and effectiv ways to ask for patient feedback. Therefore, if you're looking for the same for your practice, then let's delve into some easy tips for asking for patient feedback:

• Asking feedback via calls

• Conducting online/offline surveys

• Asking for feedback through the social media handles

• Forwarding automatized emails

• Extending the website or business portal

• Offering feedback forms to the patients

All of the above-mentioned ways of collecting feedback are genuine methods that both big and small practices have used to expand their patient reviews. However, along with implementing all of them or applying a combination of the ways mentioned above, you can also reach out to GrowPractice for the excellent solution they offer to boost patient feedback.

Improve Patient Feedback and Outcome with GrowPractice

Asking for patient feedback is really important because that would firstly empower the patients. Patient-centric service is the call of the age, and your provider couldn't simply miss out on that. Therefore, you should ensure that your medical practice asks for patient feedback in case of all the patients and that too in a professional manner that is convenient for the patients too.

GrowPractice ensures that medical practices can ask for the patient feedback in a timely and professional manner that does not become a hassle for the patients either. With the advanced patient and medical practice management software systems that can be availed from GrowPractice, you can significantly improve the practice processes, workflow, services, and more.

Right from the patient appointment scheduling, where GrowPractice offers automatic patient appointment schedulers to help patients book, change/cancel appointments quickly and easily, to the patient feedback, followup and reminder procedures, GrowPractice extends it all.

GrowPractice's improved patient feedback system helps practices collect feedback from the patients easily and without any fuss. The GrowPractice software solutions have helped practices reduce 85% of the negative online reviews, and increase positive reviews by 65%.