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Do patients love your hospital?

Does it matter if your patients love, look forward to, and actively participate in their care? Absolutely! Patient experiences, perceptions, and feelings matter. They lead to:

  • Better Patient Outcomes - Data show patients with more positive reports about their care experiences had better health outcomes even a year after discharge.

  • Improved Financial Metrics - Teasing out hospital financial metrics is daunting, but the accounting firm Deloitte reported clear correlations between hospital profitability and positive customer care.

  • Collaboration and Choice - Thanks to rising health care costs, improving technology, and rising patient expectations collaboration and choice are increasingly important.

  • Love as A Metric - With most hospital survey tools such as HCAHPS love is hard to grasp, understand, or evaluate. That's why PatientsVoices created the PatientsVoices AI Pipeline, a group of artificial intelligence algorithms, to understand, quantify, and report how patients really feel.

Hospitals with higher patient satisfaction are more profitable.

- Deloitte

Better Outcomes

As the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Improving Patient Experience report noted diabetic patients recorded better quality of life after positive interactions with their provider and heart attack patients with more positive care reports experienced better health outcomes even a year after discharge (section 2.B.). It's not hard to understand why patients who feel better about their healthcare experience feel better.

Improved Financials

The Deloitte Center For Health Solutions performed regression analyses to determine the relationship between HCAHPS scores and the financial performance of health systems. For the health systems they investigated, there was a strong association between patient experience ratings and financial performance. PatientsVoices’ solution makes it easy for other health systems to achieve these same results.

  • Hospitals with higher patient satisfaction are more profitable.

  • Even controlling for variables such as ownership (private, public), location, teaching status, and payer and case-mix, Deloitte's regression showed patient satisfaction and profits are related.

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Collaboration and Choice

As healthcare costs rise and technology becomes increasingly democratic patients seek collaboration and choice. Although there are exceptions to this rule like emergencies that may obscure an undeniable trend, patients are choosing. Our favorite proof about healthcare's collaborative and selective future comes from the American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC). In January's Relationships Between Patient Portal Activation and Patient Satisfaction, AJMC found higher satisfaction from patients with an activated healthcare portal such as EPIC and NextGen.

Love As A Metric

It's hard (or impossible) to survey love. How do you find out? You simply ask patients to share stories about recent experiences. Their words. Just two questions — describe and rate your experience. Most surveys place little to no importance on their most collaborative question - asking patients for comments. In the past, patient comments were hard to summarize, quantify, and report.

Thanks to the PatientsVoices’ Pipeline, patient stories are converted into usable statistics. By classifying, quantifying, and reporting customer stories, patient narratives and emotions are available to guide health system improvements. When PatientsVoices uses its proprietary algorithms to classify and label patient stories, the result is actionable statistics and the ability to mine comments for the specific experiences that matter to patients.

Question

Do patients love your hospital and your providers? What type of feedback are your patients providing on their experiences? Don't be fooled if survey feedback is sparse and incomplete or your vendor's comment summaries are confusing. After processing more than 130,000 stories, we know patients have a lot to say about their healthcare experiences. They already are telling family and friends about their experiences, and they will share their stories with you. When they know you are interested because you ask for feedback and they see you making improvements, this motivates them to continue sharing helpful insight on their experiences.

email - maryk.oconnor (at)patientsvoices.net