Medical practices are evaluated on the quality of care they provide their patients. Increasingly, in a consumer-driven healthcare market, practices are also assessed on patient satisfaction.
Patient satisfaction measures how happy a person is with their healthcare provider. While “patient experience” describes what happened during a person’s visit, “patient satisfaction” describes whether that experience met the patient’s expectations.
Why Patient Satisfaction Matters
Providing high-quality care is an important consideration in patient satisfaction, but it’s not the only thing that matters.
Most patients lack the medical knowledge to judge the quality of their care. Their satisfaction is colored by other factors like whether they felt respected, whether follow-up instructions were clear, and whether the clinic seemed clean and organized.
An ophthalmologist-led study published in Ophthalmology found about three-quarters of negative practice reviews online were about factors other than the physician.
In today’s market, many patients choose their healthcare providers based on online reviews and recommendations from people they know. A clinic that doesn’t pay attention to patient satisfaction could be undermining its ability to grow.
How Patient Satisfaction Impacts a Practice
When your patients are satisfied with the care they receive in your practice, your patient volume increases through word-of-mouth referrals and positive online reviews.
High satisfaction scores also boost third-party physician ratings, which patients may review when shopping around for a specialty provider.
Since it’s far less expensive to retain existing patients than find new ones, your revenue goes up without expanding your marketing budget.
You can also enjoy a shorter revenue cycle, as satisfied patients are more likely to pay bills on time and are less likely to dispute charges.
Finally, higher patient satisfaction can actually lead to better patient outcomes.
Satisfied patients trust their healthcare provider. That makes them more likely to keep follow-up appointments, follow physician recommendations, and stick with prescribed treatment plans.
How to Improve Patient Satisfaction
- Set expectations of care
- Upgrade your appointment process
- Communicate effectively
- Increase responsiveness
- Improve cultural competence
- Update your physical environment
- Take an empathetic approach to pain management
- Build a culture of professionalism
- Implement a clear billing system
- Personalize patient care
1. Set Expectations of Care
Patients don’t generally have a good benchmark they can use to measure the quality of care they receive. So they measure their experience against their expectations.
Patient satisfaction suffers when patients perceive they received less care than expected — too little time with the doctor, too little clarity on their questions, or too little respect from clinic staff, for instance.
They’re also likely to be dissatisfied if the visit was more unpleasant than they expected — for example, if the procedure took longer, was more painful, or was more invasive than they anticipated.
To improve patient satisfaction, set clear, realistic expectations before the patient comes in.
When a patient schedules an appointment, brief them on what is likely to happen at the visit and about how long it will take. Front desk staff can restate these expectations at check-in so the patient feels prepared.
Make appointment slots long enough that there’s adequate time to address patient questions. Ask open-ended questions at the beginning of the visit to learn the patient’s concerns and what they hope to accomplish.
At the end of the appointment, clearly explain what happens next so the patient leaves the appointment with a plan.
2. Upgrade Your Appointment Process
Many patients form their first impression of your clinic based on your appointment scheduling process. It’s the first interaction they have with your practice, and it sets the tone for the rest of the relationship.
To improve patient satisfaction, make booking an appointment easy and enjoyable.
- Set up a system that lets patients book an appointment in whatever way they choose: in person, by phone, or online. Nextech offers scheduling tools that make it easy for patients to book, cancel, and reschedule their own appointments without having to call the office.
- Offer online resources that reduce inbound call volume, so patients who do call aren’t left waiting on hold. The integrated patient portal in Nextech’s EHR offers a convenient way for patients to find information and ask questions without tying up phone lines.
- Reduce no-shows with automated appointment reminders. Include useful information like directions to your facility and parking information. Also, include a link the patient can use to reschedule if needed.
- When patients enter the office, greet them warmly. If they’re making an appointment, a user-friendly drag-and-drop scheduling tool makes it quick and easy. If they’re checking in, check them in quickly and give them an estimated wait time.
- Optimize your practice workflows with a comprehensive solution like Nextech’s EHR and practice management software. The more efficiently your practice is running, the less time patients have to wait to be seen.
3. Communicate Effectively
Satisfied patients understand the information presented to them. They leave their appointment feeling as though they were listened to and all their questions were answered.
To improve patient satisfaction, remember that for many people, a medical appointment can be scary or stressful. This affects their ability to understand and retain information.
Give the patient space to ask questions. Use simple, nonmedical language and provide additional resources they can review at a calmer time.
Information about the patient’s diagnosis and treatment plan can be included in their patient portal, so it won’t be misplaced like a brochure may be. The patient portal also offers a convenient way for them to ask questions and communicate with their provider between appointments.
A chatbot on your website can also provide patients with easy-to-understand information on demand.
4. Increase Responsiveness
We live in an “on-demand” culture. People are frustrated by long waits — whether it’s waiting 20 minutes on hold, an hour in a waiting room, weeks to hear about test results, or months to get an appointment.
To improve patient experience, shorten the times people have to wait.
Use chatbots, an online resource library, and patient portals to put information at patients’ fingertips so they don’t have to call for answers to simple questions.
Increase your appointment capacity with telehealth, so patients don’t need to wait so long for appointments. In some parts of the country, it can take a month or more to get an in-person appointment with a dermatologist, while a telehealth appointment can often be scheduled in a matter of days.
Sometimes, wait times are out of your control. You can still keep patients satisfied by checking in and acknowledging the wait. Offer people in the waiting room bottled water or packaged snacks. If lab reports are taking longer than expected, drop a note in the patient portal letting the patient know the tests are still being processed and you’ll inform them as soon as you have results.
5. Improve Cultural Competence
Thanks to a highly mobile world population, medical providers see patients from a wide range of diverse backgrounds. This can create challenges such as communication barriers, accommodating differing levels of health literacy, and misunderstandings stemming from cultural beliefs.
Cultural misunderstandings can lead to patients feeling not only dissatisfied, but confused, disrespected, or unsafe.
Improving cultural competence in healthcare means understanding the potential impact of differences and personalizing healthcare across cultural, socioeconomic, and linguistic groups.
To improve patient satisfaction, make cultural competence a cornerstone of your healthcare practice.
- Cultural differences can be aggravated by unconscious bias. Invest in cultural competence training for your staff. This will help them learn to communicate across cultures and can highlight any internal processes or policies that make your practice inaccessible to certain communities.
- Deepen your understanding of your local community to make sure you are accessible to the people in your city. For example, if a significant portion of the local population speaks a language other than English at home, have an interpreter on staff and provide multilingual educational materials.
- Recruit and retain team members from diverse backgrounds. When patients see staff who look like them, it helps patients to feel safe and comfortable. The Association of American Medical Colleges suggests patients in minority populations have statistically better health outcomes when their provider shares their background.
6. Update Your Physical Environment
Your quality of care might be immaculate, but your patients will never believe it if your office looks dingy.
The cleanliness of a practice is one of the patient satisfaction standards measured by HCAHPS, and even though the survey’s focus is hospitals, it should be taken seriously by anyone in the health profession. But keeping the practice clean is just the bare minimum.
Everything about the physical space, from parking to layout to décor, contributes to a patient’s impression of your practice.
To improve patient satisfaction, carefully design your practice to make patients feel comfortable and empowered.
The patient experience starts outside. Have sufficient parking or a valet service so patients don’t have to drive around looking for a spot. The exterior of the building should be tidy and in good repair.
Make sure the building is accessible to people with limited mobility. Have clear, easy-to-read signage throughout the facility so patients know where to go.
All patient-facing areas, from corridors to waiting rooms to bathrooms, should be clean, well-maintained, and up-to-date.
Have a comfortable, welcoming waiting room. Consider the mood and energy created by your choice of color palettes, fabric patterns, and wall art.
Design the layout of your office with a natural flow. Avoid cramped or crowded quarters; people should have enough room to maintain a sense of privacy and personal space.
7. Take an Empathetic Approach to Pain Management
Even patients satisfied with your practice to start with can change their mind if they find themselves in unexpectedly severe pain.
Surgical patients whose post-procedure pain is not well managed are more likely to regret the procedure than those in less pain. Not surprisingly, pain is also linked to lower rates of patient satisfaction.
To improve patient satisfaction, help patients set realistic expectations for their post-treatment pain.
If a patient complains of unexpected pain, listen to them and take their complaint seriously. Low satisfaction scores are often tied to patients who feel their doctor disregarded their pain.
Before and after the procedure, counsel patients on ways they can manage their pain at home, including medication, ice packs, and physical therapy.
8. Build a Culture of Professionalism
Remember, a routine day at work for you can be a frightening or stressful experience for your patients. Seeing staff demonstrate professionalism reassures patients that they are in good hands and receiving quality care.
To improve patient satisfaction, look at your patient’s experience from their point of view.
- All patient-facing staff should dress appropriately and maintain a neat, clean appearance.
- Staff should conduct themselves professionally any time a patient is in the room. This includes using polite language and remaining patient focused — for example, while taking a patient’s vitals, staff shouldn’t chat with one another about their weekend plans.
- Patients build relationships with providers, not clinics. Make every effort to schedule a patient with the same provider each time so they can build trust and rapport. This aids patient satisfaction and patient retention.
- Invest in training and continuing education. Healthcare is constantly evolving. When staff expand their knowledge and develop new skills, it enables them to provide a higher level of care.
9. Implement a Clear Billing System
A satisfying patient experience can be undone when a patient tries to pay their bill.
Billing errors and unexpected charges are top reasons for payment frustration. The frustration only gets worse if your staff can’t answer their questions or you don’t take their preferred method of payment.
To improve patient satisfaction, implement a billing system that’s simple, clear, and up-to-date.
Have a process for insurance pre-approval and be transparent about pricing, so patients know beforehand what they can expect to pay.
An integrated payment solution like the one offered by Nextech can make the billing process easier for you and your patients. It reduces billing errors, allows patients to pay electronically, and even enables a convenient point-of-sale system so the patient can pay from anywhere in the practice, at any time during the appointment.
10. Personalize Patient Care
When patients feel their doctor has a good bedside manner and cares for them as an individual, they not only report higher rates of satisfaction — they are more likely to believe their treatment was effective.
To improve patient satisfaction, take the small actions that let patients know you care.
It might not be possible to flawlessly remember all the information you have about your patient, but it is possible to note all that information in your EHR. Customize your Summary Page to deliver the relevant facts you need at a glance.
Investigate AI-powered innovations to record and take notes during appointments so you can give your patient your full attention. A tailored EHR lets you access needed information quickly without ignoring your patient to click through tabs.
Between appointments, use automated outreach to keep in touch. An automated patient engagement system can send text messages or emails to remind patients of appointments, check in after a set amount of time, and offer timely, helpful health information.
Patient Satisfaction Leads to Practice Success
An investment in patient satisfaction is an investment in your business. It raises patient retention, makes marketing easier, and even improves patient health outcomes.
Nextech’s specialty-specific EHR and practice management system helps dermatology, ophthalmology, plastic surgery, med spa, and orthopedics practices operate efficiently while delighting their patients.
Schedule a demo to see what Nextech has to offer.