It is becoming increasingly important for medical professionals to have a process in place for collecting patient feedback. Not only to collect positive reviews to help engage with new patients, but also as a way to identify any potential gaps in care or patient experience. Collecting patient feedback ultimately helps to improve patient satisfaction as it allows patients to feel that they are contributing to the quality of care they and others receive, as well as giving you free insight into how you can grow as a healthcare provider and as a practice.
Here are some of the four key reasons why collecting patient feedback is so important.
1. Insight to improve care
Collecting patient feedback helps you to identify any potential gaps in care along with helping you measure progress towards closing those gaps and improving patient experience.
Unless you understand a patient’s experience, it can be difficult to understand how care can be improved. Guesswork is not enough, especially in a landscape where, more than ever before, reviews and feedback affect the way people feel about the services they use. In the digital world, people expect you to ask for reviews, and also expect their feedback to directly contribute to future decision making. Every business needs to fulfil their customers’ expectations, and reviews help you to do exactly that.
It makes sense to ask for patient feedback about appointment setting, waiting times, the quality of the reception they’re given, the doctor’s bedside manner, thoroughness, communication skills, levels of professionalism and more. This will allow you to see a 360 degree view of the patient experience, highlighting areas of improvement.
2. Boost patient engagement
Giving patients the opportunity to provide feedback helps them to feel like they are valued. It helps them to feel more engaged with their care experience, and fully-engaged patients can mean improved patient retention as well as better health outcomes overall.
3. Reputation management
A 2019 study published on Software Advice found that “spending as little as 10 minutes a week cultivating your online presence and addressing feedback publicly reduces the impact of negative reviews by up to 70 percent”.
Increasingly, more patients are looking online in order to determine which healthcare provider to go to. This makes reputation management more important now than ever before, with search engine results often being the first impression patients see of your clinic. If patients click through to your page and see little feedback or negative reviews, they’re less likely to trust you as a healthcare provider over someone with hundreds of five star reviews.
Patients also value seeing consultants personally respond to patient reviews and feedback, helping to demonstrate that you’re available, accountable, and easy to engage with.
4. Patient retention
Like all businesses, yours depends on making a reasonable amount of money, and that means hanging onto every patient for as long as you can. It ultimately takes more time and money to engage with new patients than it does to keep an existing one, making it important to focus on patient retention. Collecting patient feedback and using this information to build a strong online presence offers a proven strategy to boost patient retention.
If you don’t already collect patient reviews, it’s time to begin. Doctify offers the opportunity for you to take control of your online reputation, helping to drive patient engagement with your practice and giving you a means to collect, share, and manage patient feedback. Ultimately, helping you increase overall patient satisfaction, leading to higher patient retention, and helping you to grow as a business.
