How to Conduct a Patient Experience Survey: Facility Guide

For healthcare facilities, providing high quality care requires an ongoing evaluation of what can be improved. Beyond assessing objective health outcomes, it’s important to evaluate how patients feel about the services they receive. By conducting a patient experience survey, your facility can ensure that all the non-clinical aspects of care delivery aren’t being overlooked.

But how exactly do you conduct a meaningful patient survey? To help you put resources in the right places, we’ll walk through everything you need to know from selecting the right survey tools to collecting responses from patients.

What Is the Patient Experience?

The patient experience encompasses all of the interactions a patient has with the healthcare system, from filling out administrative intake forms to discussing care plans with doctors and nurses. According to experts, the patient experience is more specifically tied to four key factors:

• Independent and collective events: This refers to everything that happens to patients as they move through the care continuum, such as phone consultations, referrals, and transfers.
• Individualized care delivery: This is the process of tailoring services to meet the needs of patients and engaging them in care.
• Patient expectations: This refers to everything that patients place value on beyond clinical outcomes, such as courtesy, safety, communication, and access to care.
• Patient- and family-centered care: This encompasses all of the principles related to delivering and focusing on person-centered care.

Fundamentally, each patient has their own unique perception of their healthcare journey. It’s important to evaluate each patient’s individual needs and preferences to ensure that they receive respectful, safe, high-quality care.

What Is a Patient Experience Survey?

This survey, often referred to as a patient satisfaction survey, is a method of gathering feedback about care from the patient’s perspective. As patient experiences can be highly subjective, surveys are used to turn subjective information into actionable, meaningful data. Surveys can ask patients questions about various aspects of the care process, such as:

• Accessibility and costs.
• Timeliness of care delivery.
• Manners of providers and staff.
• Technical quality of treatment.
• Comfort within the environment.

Types of Patient Satisfaction Surveys

There are many types of surveys that can be used to gather insights from patients. Facilities can either use existing tools or create their own set of questions. Below are a few standardized patient experience survey tools that are backed by research from leading health organizations:

• Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS)
• Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers & Systems (CAHPS)
• The Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire (PSQ)

While certain CMS-participating facilities must use the HCAHPS for billing purposes, the type of survey you administer will typically depend on the needs of your facility. You may choose to use these standardized surveys in full or reference them to tailor surveys on more specific points of care, such as appointment booking or wait times.

Questions to Ask in Patient Experience Surveys

If you decide to customize your own survey, you’ll need to determine what aspects of your care you’d like to focus on. Here are some example questions that can help you understand how satisfied a patient is with your services:

• Were our staff considerate of your needs?
• How easy was it to schedule an appointment?
• Do you feel that our work hours are well-suited for your needs?
• How would you rate the cleanliness of our facility?
• Do you feel that you received enough information about your care?
• Are you happy with the treatment that the doctor prescribed you?
• Did you have any issues during the billing process?
• Is there anything else that you would like us to know?

What Are the Benefits of Conducting Patient Surveys?

Understanding the patient experience in healthcare is an important way to improve care delivery. Surveys empower the patient to share personal perspectives that can’t be observed elsewhere. Through conducting these surveys, facilities are able to:

• Give patients a platform to voice their opinions.
• Identify non-clinical strengths and weaknesses in services.
• Gather collective feedback to improve care delivery.
• Enhance facility performance and workflow.

For facilities participating in CMS programming, receiving favorable patient ratings on the HCAHPS can also lead to higher reimbursement rates. For more guidelines on how to administer this particular survey, visit the CMS resource center.

Conducting Your Survey: 5 Essential Tips

Now that we’ve gone over what these surveys are and why they’re important, you may be wondering how to conduct one at your facility. Follow these essential tips to help you adhere to best practices.

1. Select the Right Questions and Rating System

It’s important to use patient experience survey questions that will help you meet your goals. Are you looking for an overview of common points of dissatisfaction or more targeted feedback on specific services? Deciphering this will allow you to determine whether you should use a comprehensive, standardized survey or create your own.

If you do decide to create your own survey, remember to reference standardized surveys as a way to inform your language and format. Additionally, keep the following tips in mind:

• Ask simple and essential questions: Patients have varying levels of literacy, so it’s important to ask straightforward questions that are easy to understand.
• Consider different rating systems: If you’re seeking big picture, quantitative data, consider asking patients to rate their care on a numeric scale. If you’re looking for detailed, qualitative feedback, a free response text box will likely be more appropriate.
• Uphold confidentiality: Keep surveys anonymous and ensure your questions don’t ask for identifiable information. Not only does this encourage more honest responses, but it also helps protect patient privacy.

2. Target a Meaningful Sample Size

When it comes to conducting a patient experience survey, sample sizes don’t always have to be statistically significant. The number of patients you collect feedback from will greatly depend on the goals and structure of your survey.

If you’re collecting quantitative data for large-scale quality improvement, then you’ll want to use a statistically significant sample size. A statistician or healthcare researcher can help you calculate the number of responses you need.

If you’re gathering qualitative data on individualized feedback, then statistical significance won’t be that relevant. In this case, it’s important to have a reasonably sized sample so that your staff can thoroughly read through and digest the details given.

3. Consider Time Frames and Incentives

Patients sometimes wait to fill out surveys well-past their appointment dates. This can make it difficult for them to recall their experiences. To ensure responses are as accurate as possible, consider setting a due date by when surveys need to be returned. Offering incentives, such as gift cards or raffle entries, can also motivate patients to get their responses in by the deadline.

4. Use Effective Modes of Distribution

There are many different ways you can distribute a survey. When it comes to paper surveys, you can either hand them out directly at your care center, have surveyors fill out information via telephone, or mail surveys to your patients’ residences. However, experts typically recommend mailing out surveys and following-up by telephone to increase accuracy and completion of responses.

There are also several online platforms designed to help you create and distribute electronic surveys. If you decide to distribute surveys online, just be sure to use a HIPAA-compliant platform, such as Qualtrics or RedCap.

5. Analyze Responses

Once you’ve gathered enough responses, it can take time to piece everything together. If you have quantitative data, consider working with statisticians and healthcare researchers who can carry out appropriate statistical analyses. If you’re sifting through qualitative data, employ a systematic process for organizing common themes brought up by patients.

Finding patterns in your data can help you identify areas of care that are working well or require improvement. While analysis can feel tedious, it’s an important step in survey conduction that enables you to turn data into actionable measures.

Discover More Ways to Improve Patient Care

Conducting a patient experience survey is one of many ways to improve the services provided by your facility. Learn even more helpful tips and strategies on how to deliver patient-centered care through IntelyCare’s free newsletter.