The healthcare market is more competitive than ever. Independent practices face strong competition from other practices, as well as hospitals and other larger healthcare systems, making standing out more important than ever before. One of the easiest ways to do so is to be in tune with what exactly patients want, and offer it to them.

Patient feedback has always been an important part of running a successful practice, and its importance is still very high. Providers need to have a system in place that allows them to understand the needs and wants of their patients and then implement the changes needed to meet these demands. Identifying and fixing the gaps in their care will help practices improve patient satisfaction, loyalty, engagement, and outcomes, by offering care of the standard that patients expect.

A patient feedback system can be easy to implement, however making sure it actually serves its intended purpose can be harder. But to make it a bit easier for you, here are a few simple steps you can follow:

1. A committee

The first thing to do is to establish a committee that is responsible for handling patient feedback. This committee should include people from both the clinical and non-clinical staff, at least one of each, working together to develop and implement the feedback system you will be using.

Other jobs that this committee will be responsible for include deciding how to collect the feedback, what questions to include, and then collecting and tabulating the results in a format that makes them easy to understand.

2. Consider patient demographics

When deciding on the method you will be using to collect the feedback, its important to take into account the demographics of your patient pool. Seniors, for example, may struggle with electronic surveys, so practices with a high percentage of senior patients might be better off using printed forms.

For younger patients, there are a variety of tools available for conducting electronic surveys, many of which can also compile the results in easy to view and understand formats.

3. Requesting feedback

Patients should be asked to provide feedback as soon as their visit ends. At this time patients will have just ended their journey through your practice, and so any constructive feedback they have to offer will still be fresh in their minds. Directing them to a feedback form immediately following their visit will also increase the likelihood of them actually filling it out.

4. Follow up

Whenever any piece of negative feedback is received, it is important to follow up immediately with patients to try and get more details and to resolve whatever issue they encountered. Once this is done, the practice can then put policies in place to ensure that the same issue is never repeated. This will also make patients feel heard, improving their satisfaction and making it more likely for them to continue coming to your practice.

5. Implement changes

Once the feedback it collected, that’s when the real work begins. Simply collecting the feedback is not enough, practices must use the collected feedback to identify pain points in the patient experience, and then plan out and implement changes that will resolve these issues.

6. Maintaining consistency

This entire process is not simply a one-time thing. Practices must continue to collect feedback and implement any changes that are needed for improving the patient experience. This is the only way they will be able to continue identifying and addressing any gaps that appear in their care, and maintain a high quality of care in order to continue meeting and exceeding patient expectations.