Dennis Martin is senior vice president for client services and network development at Health Inventures in Broomfield, Colo.
Q: How do you use patient satisfaction surveys?
Dennis Martin: Patient satisfaction surveys are really important for us. They are ingrained in our culture. The executives at most of our health system partners are incentivized through patient satisfaction scores. Our surgery sites are required to use patient satisfaction surveys as a management tool for process improvement. Our sites' results can also be compared with similar surveys at our hospital perioperative departments to measure overall improvement in the health system network. We also compare the results with national benchmarks for ASCs.
Q: How do you distribute the surveys?
DM: Every patient gets a patient satisfaction survey. The surveys are developed by Healthstream specifically for ASCs. We have added questions to Healthstream's nationally benchmarked questions for our own purposes. The survey is easy to fill out. There are just 25 questions, 20 of which are national and five of which are our own. There is also a comment section to fill in. This is a Web-based program. Patients get a link to the online questionnaire when they leave the recovery area. This allows them to consider their experiences after they have fully recovered.
Q: What is the focus of the questions?
DM: The questions cover the full patient experience in the ASC, focusing on comfort, quality and communication, but not on the surgeons' performance. However, patients are asked to rate their experience with the physician and the completeness and thoroughness of their medical treatment. We encourage individual comments in addition to the questions.
Q: Who reviews the results?
DM: A patient care committee at each center reviews the results, which come back in a tabulated form, not identifying individual patients. The committee is largely staffed by front-line employees and typically meets monthly. Based on the survey results, the committee usually identifies 3-4 patient satisfaction issues for the center to work on and makes recommendations to the administrator. Working with the regional vice president, the administrator initiates an action plan to address the issues. Afterward, the committee keeps track of how these initiatives are impacting patient satisfaction.
Q: How do your centers perform on the survey?
DM: Our scores are significantly higher than the national benchmark. The scores also unleash healthy competition within our network of surgery sites. Our administrative teams want to keep their scores consistently high. Regional vice presidents review the tabulated scores. Also, they are often used as a new norm for one of our partnering health systems. That puts pressure on lower-scoring centers within the system to try to raise their scores.
Q: What kinds of issues can the survey identify?
DM: There are all kinds of clues that can be found in patient satisfaction results. For example, we ask how long the patient had to wait from being diagnosed to actually having surgery. A long wait may be caused by a problem at the physician's office but it could also relate to difficulties accessing the ASC schedule. That is a major concern for the ASC because you may be losing many patients who did not want to wait. We also monitor what the patient says about access so we can streamline scheduling issues.
In the comment section, the patient may also evaluate a particular staff member. We bring comments to the attention of that particular staff member. This can be a way of detecting a weaker employee whose performance needs to be more closely managed.
Q: Do you ever see a significant variation in scores?
DM: The scores are usually pretty stable, but you can see a variation when staff changes. We also compare the patient satisfaction results to employee and physician satisfaction surveys that go out every year. Lower staff satisfaction can significantly reduce patient satisfaction. If we found staff morale to be significantly lower, we would form a special committee to assess the problem and take steps, if necessary.
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