How To Get Patient Feedback That Is Actionable
In patient included or patient centred healthcare approach, patient feedback is key for improved care, and healthcare experience. Pep Health uses a digital platform to collect and analyze patient feedback from various online sources, moving away from traditional, less effective survey methods.
The platform provides detailed scores and insights, allowing healthcare providers to make targeted improvements in specific areas like access and quality within their facilities. The data and insights generated are influencing healthcare policies and practices, leading to changes in areas such as maternity services and mental health care delivery.
Traditional feedback methods face three key challenges:
Top-Down Design Flaw: Traditional patient feedback methods, like surveys, are structured in a top-down manner. This means healthcare providers or researchers dictate what aspects of care are important and then ask patients to provide feedback on these predetermined areas. This approach fails to put patients in the driver's seat to express what truly matters most to them in their care experience.
Unrepresentative Sample: The demographic of patients who typically complete these surveys tends to be limited. Generally, those who participate are people with more time available, often English speakers, and usually inpatients. This creates a skewed representation of patient feedback, as it predominantly reflects the experiences of a specific subset of patients, rather than a diverse cross-section.
Cost and Time Burden: Conducting traditional surveys is costly, and the process places a significant time burden on many individuals across the healthcare system. This includes not only the patients who are asked to fill out these surveys but also the staff who administer, collect, and analyze the data. The resource-intensive nature of this traditional method can be a substantial barrier to collecting patient feedback efficiently and effectively.
At HLTH 2023, Pep Health Founder Meghan Leaver shared more insights behind:
Innovation in the patient feedback gathering,
What actionable insight healthcare providers can get from PEP insights,
Impact patient feedback analysis can have on policymaking
Concrete examples of the impact of PEP Platform insights include:
Improving Maternity Services:
Context: PEP data was utilized in collaboration with a hospital in the UK, focusing on their maternity services department.
Issue Identified: Feedback indicated that patients in the antenatal area lacked sufficient educational services. Women did not understand essential aspects of their care, such as the purpose and nature of upcoming tests, risk indicators, and interpreting information provided by clinicians.
Solution Implemented: Based on these insights, the maternity services unit developed an educational package to address these gaps. This package was communicated online and through official channels within the unit.
Outcome: The initiative led to a direct improvement in women’s experiences of care, highlighting the effectiveness of tailored interventions based on real-time patient feedback.
Enhancing Patient-Driven Healthcare Quality:
Goal: There is a desire to move beyond treating patient experience as a mere "tick box exercise" and instead to embed real patient experiences meaningfully into the delivery of quality healthcare.
Methodology: PEP’s approach involves generating like-for-like comparisons and meaningful, actionable scores that reflect what patients genuinely value in their healthcare experiences.
Aspiration: The aim is to empower patients to be in the driving seat of healthcare changes, ensuring that system improvements align with what matters most to patients.
Here is a summarized transcript:
Why is it important that we gather patient feedback?
Megan Leaver: I'm a psychologist by background and have spent years in health systems, listening to patient stories. Traditional methods of understanding patient experiences, like surveys, are flawed. They're top-down, unrepresentative, and costly. We started Pep Health to change how patient experience is leveraged to improve quality. Our digital platform gathers patient feedback from across the web, including social media and review sites, and makes it actionable for healthcare providers.
How exactly is this actionable to a specific hospital?
We provide a PEP score, detailing areas like access and quality, down to specific facilities within a health system. This helps hospitals pinpoint where improvements are needed and evaluate their impact in real-time.
What kind of changes do your customers implement based on your assessments?
Our clients often reduce the burden of internal surveys, replacing them with our tool for more passive, yet insightful, patient experience evaluation. This aids in value-based negotiations and transparency around healthcare quality, cost, and patient experience.
Can you elaborate on the data set you're using?
We gather publicly available online feedback from various sources, considering the demographic traffic of these platforms. Our tool is language-agnostic, covering numerous languages, ensuring a broad demographic reach. We prioritize aggregate level patient experiences to identify trends rather than individual outliers.
What are the key findings from your data?
Key findings include a crisis in fast access to care across the U.S., with variations in quality among services and states. Our insights help identify best practices and areas needing improvement.
Can you explain what fast access means?
Fast access refers to reduced waiting times and easy scheduling with qualified professionals. It's one of the key quality domains recognized internationally by the WHO.
Are you also influencing healthcare system changes?
Yes, we aim to influence policy by providing a like-for-like methodology for benchmarking patient experiences across facilities. This assists regulators and policymakers in setting informed healthcare policies.
Can you share any specific changes implemented as a result of your insights?
Our data has led to significant changes, particularly in maternity services, where real-time feedback has improved patient education and communication.
What's the most challenging aspect of your work?
The biggest challenge is overcoming the traditional apathetic attitude towards patient experience measurement. Our goal is to revolutionize this by including patient voices as a metric for quality.
Besides access, what other issues are prominent in patient feedback?
Effective treatment, continuity of care, and the handling of mental health services are other key areas patients frequently discuss online.