Seeing Into the Patient Experience

The Crossroads Group, Inc., a patient survey company, joined a SyncTimes webinar to share industry insights into the patient experience and provide benchmarking data.

We've pulled a couple sections of the webinar that highlight how health centers can improve the patient experience and data driven insights on patient perspective.

View the full webinar on YouTube here!

The Crossroads Group: Quality of Care is the Leading Variable in Patient Reported Satisfaction

Mark Robledo explains patient satisfaction and correlation based on patient responses to qualitative survey questions.

Mark: We look also at the correlation between some of the questions we ask and the overall rating. And what we find is that quality of care almost invariably is the highest correlator. We see that with almost every client. Quality of care is the key driver. It’s the reason why patients go for health care. So, you can have the nicest staff in the world, but if the quality of the care is not good, your visit is kind of a waste of time.  

What SyncTimes does is ultimately have a huge impact on the quality of care because of that coordination aspect. Everyone knows where everyone is. They can maximize the value added to that patient during the visit in the shortest amount of time possible. That has a direct impact on that quality-of-care perception.

Other key drivers are:

• Provider explanation of care
• Provider listening
• Knowledge of health history
• Time spent by the provider (not only of the minutes spent but the quality of those minutes)

All of those are key drivers of patient experience. That is backed up by hundreds of thousands of surveys that we have in our database.  

Alan: I’m curious, when you have health centers with quality-of-care measures lower than they want it to be, what are the levers that they’re pulling? When we think about quality, we think of is quality scores and measures that we use to track that. I’m guessing that when a patient receives a question about quality-of-care on a phone call survey, maybe they don’t think about it in the exact same way. So, what are some the ways you see health centers are improving the quality of care that patients are reporting?

Mark: That’s a great question. What I’ve seen over the years is that sometimes staff and patients define quality in different ways. Sometimes nurses define quality as the quality of a blood draw in terms of the phlebotomy, or the quality of a diagnosis, or the quality of the medical care. That is part of the quality of care from the patient's perspective, but quality is defined more broadly by patients. Patients are not always able to identify quality from a clinical standpoint. But they can determine if:

• Someone was friendly to them
• Someone communicated to them
• Someone explained care

Benchmarking Data From SyncTimes

SyncTimes: Provider Minutes and Perception Based on Quality of Interaction

Alan Bucknum emphasizes key factors that contribute to the patients' perception of time with provider.

Alan: The next benchmark is provider minutes. Mark, you mentioned specific measures related to time with the provider. We’ve seen some interesting perceptions there. Some providers do not spend more time with patients, but they make that patient feel loved and cared about. The provider remembers things from your past conversations. And the providers cheat on that, you know they put notes in their EHR like, “Mark’s daughter just graduated high school. Remember to ask how she’s doing.” Those things help patients perceive that the provider time is valuable and sufficient. We have relatively few providers whose patients key in on the provider spending less time with them, if the provider does a great job communicating, understanding and having great bedside manner.  

SyncTimes: Benchmarking Data and How Staff Perceive Patient Arrival Times  

Alan Bucknum dissects how our perception of patient arrival times may be skewed.

Alan: We want to give you quantitative data on what we capture in SyncTimes. One of the benchmarks we look at is what percent of patients checked in within 4 minutes of their appointment time. What we hear often is this antidote in healthcare that, “Most of our patients are late, therefore we really struggle to run on time.” What we see on average is, yes absolutely there are patients who are late. The lowest performing health center on this mark has around 50% of their patients running late for their appointments. Not coincidentally, that is a health center where their wait times tend to be longer. So, a patient at this health center has a patient at 3 o’clock, and that patient knows that doesn’t really mean they have a 3 o’clock appointment.  

You see here that at our median health center, 3 out of 4 patients are checking in within 5 minutes of their appointment time. And that arrival is often skewed a little bit more towards patients being late based on perception.  

TAKEAWAYS

1. Quality of care is the leading variable in patient satisfaction. How patients perceive and define the quality of care they receive can be different than how healthcare professionals think about it. Understanding how your patient is perceiving their experience through qualitative data can give you the insight you need to drive improvement.
2. The quality of the interaction between a patient and provider can alert the patient's perception on how much time their provider spent with them. Time, in minutes and quality, with the patient directly impact health outcomes.
3. More patient's than you might realize are arriving on within 5 minutes of their appointment time. Health centers running behind schedule may be less on the shoulders on patient's than is perceived.

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Request a free copy of the full 2024 Clinical Operations Benchmark Report.

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View the full webinar on YouTube here!

Connect with The Crossroads Group or SyncTimes.

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