Are You Soliciting Feedback from Your Patients?

We regularly stress on this blog that your practice is a business.  Because we are in the business of providing a professional service, and that service comes through as more of a need of our customers than something they are voluntarily seeking, we sometimes lose sight that medical practices are businesses.

It is standard practice for businesses to solicit feedback from their customers.  How does your practice facilitate feedback from patients?  Are you required to survey patients for quality initiatives or other programs focused on providing quality care?  In our own physician practices, we utilize Survey Monkey on handheld tablets.  Our patients love this method, and find it easy and quick to give us valuable feedback as they’re on their way out the door.  This gives us immediate actionable information from our patients.

Here are a few ways to solicit feedback from your patients:

•  In-office patient kiosks

• Handheld tablets

• Comment cards

• Emails sent to patients encouraging them to fill out your own survey or write an online review (you can     direct them to particular platforms to review on as well such as Yelp or Facebook)

• Online programs such as Survey Monkey

• You can also work with full-service agencies that build your online presence through patient reviews and feedback such as PatientPop

 These are just some of the options and programs that we are most familiar with, and we are certainly not endorsing any nor promoting one over another. All of these are great options but none are “one size fits all”, every practice is unique and one method of patient feedback might work better than another for your particular practice. If you have questions, please feel free to reach out, we are happy to offer any direction we can.