Six Simple Patient Satisfaction Ideas You Can Implement Now

These inexpensive additions can generate glowing patient survey responses without breaking the bank.

Patients expect stellar surgical care, but as years of satisfaction survey scores attest, they judge their overall experience on far more than that. Even a peripheral experience during their time in a center that they found uncomfortable or annoying can trump successful clinical outcomes when they fill out a survey about how happy they were in your care.

Affordable keys to a VIP patient experience

Meeting this challenge doesn’t need to be an expensive proposition. There are affordable measures facilities can take to make patients feel calmer, perfectly prepared and like they are being cared for by a family member. Here are six tips your center can implement quickly to set yourself apart in the competitive outpatient environment.

• Embrace artificial intelligence (AI). A recent Stanford University study showed that patients preferred AI-generated responses to questions more than the ones physicians gave them. Six clinicians evaluated AI and original-clinician responses for information quality and empathy, while 30 people from the Stanford Research Registry assessed the responses for satisfaction. The participants estimated that satisfaction was higher with AI responses than the clinicians’ responses.

The researchers believe the study, which appeared in the JAMA Network Open journal in October, is the first to assess satisfaction with AI-generated responses to patient-created medical questions in electronic health records. While survey participants assessed the satisfaction, not the patients themselves, the study is a close proxy of patients’ perspectives, say the researchers.

“Satisfaction was consistently higher with AI-generated responses than with clinicians overall and by specialty,” notes the study. “However, satisfaction was not necessarily concordant with the clinician-determined information quality and empathy. For example, satisfaction was highest with AI responses to cardiology questions while information quality and empathy were highest in endocrinology questions. Interestingly, clinicians’ response length was associated with satisfaction while AI’s response length was not. The findings suggest that the extreme brevity of [clinician] responses could be a factor that lowers satisfaction in patient-clinician communication in EHR.”

• Don’t keep them waiting. Think outside the box to come up with creative ways to “get ’em in and get ’em out” safely and responsibly. On the front end, work with the staff at physicians’ offices to make sure patients are told to arrive at your ASC or HOPD at an appropriate time before their surgery.

A frequent patient complaint is being told to arrive 90 minutes or more before a procedure. Patients won’t differentiate between who told them to be there early at the site where their procedure took place. One reason patients are told to show up hours before their surgery may be a physician’s desire to have a packed house and ensure a steady stream of work in the event of a cancellation.

This warrants a conversation with the physician’s office to come up with a time that’s reasonable. Long waits can also be caused by other factors and can be an inherent challenge for high-volume facilities. Tampa Surgery Center, for example, recently found an innovative way to reduce two-hour wait times to about an hour. (See “Making Room for More Patients”).

“Some of our patients come from as long as an hour away, so they want to spend as little time here as they have to,” says Melanie Pogoda, the facility’s clinical administrator. “Our ability to get them in and out as quickly as we can is one of our patient satisfaction highlights.”

To minimize long waits, coordinate closely with the physician’s office to make sure patients are arriving at the appropriate time for their procedure. If this fails, communicate. If a patient still arrives at 8:30 a.m. for an 11 a.m. procedure, identify the situation, and explain that they have time to run an errand before you need them back to register.

PATIENT FAVORITE A simple warmed blanket goes a long way toward setting the stage for a satisfying perioperative experience.

• Keep them warm. Staff at Eye 35 ASC in Schertz, Texas, don’t need to comb through patient satisfaction surveys to know how much their patients love warmed blankets because so many of the patients have a procedure on one eye and return soon thereafter to get the second eye done.

“When they come back for their second eye, one of the first things they say is, ‘Oh, I’m so excited for the warm blanket!’” says Karen Dargan, BSN, RN, director of nursing. “But we already knew that, because so many patients have such a reaction of, ‘Oh, this is great, I love this’ the first time we put it over them.”

While there are significant clinical benefits to keeping patients warm (see “Eight Ways to Make Patient Warming a Priority,” page 57), the simple comfort warmed blankets provide make them popular, says Ms. Dargan. This is true even though Eye 35’s patients don’t need to change into a gown and can keep their shoes on if they prefer.

“The operating room is still pretty cold and sometimes they’re just coming in when it’s cool outside or are affected by the air conditioning in the waiting room,” she says. “Most patients are also a bit nervous, and the warmed blankets have a very good calming effect.”

• Make them laugh. Eye 35 staff have a stash of “Dad Jokes” that pre-op nurses use with patients to help them relax and laugh a little before their procedures.

An employee in the billing department brings in new jokes almost every day and shares them with the clinical staff. They’re short and simple. Take this recent addition, for example: “What’s a pilot’s favorite kind of yogurt? Plain.”

Pre-op staff breaks out its book of Dad Jokes whenever they sense some humor is needed to lighten a patient’s mindset. “If a patient is really nervous, we might say, ‘Hey, do you want to hear some really bad jokes?’ And if they do, we just kind of go from there,” says Clinical Director Carson McCafferty, MSN, RN, CNOR, CNAMB, CSRN.

Ms. McCafferty says it’s easy to tell which patients will be receptive, but sometimes even patients who don’t seem like the type to joke around before a surgery get involved. The laugh-fest can be contagious and lighten the mood for the entire pre-op unit.

“Often, one nurse will start it. Then another will say, ‘Oh, I have one too!’ says Ms. McCafferty. “Because our unit is really small, the patients in the other bays can hear the jokes too and then they chime in. It becomes a conversation between everyone in the room.”

TAKING REQUESTS Allowing patients to select the music that will be played in the OR during their procedure is an effective calming measure.

• Let them be the DJ. Consider allowing patients to choose the music that will play in the OR as they undergo their procedures. Eye 35 asks patients what kind of music they like and if they have any specific preferences in their genre of choice, says Staff Nurse Beth Sherwood, BSN, RN.

“If they have a request, we change it from what was queued up, which was generally a nurse or surgeon preference, to what they asked for,” she says. “We really like to hear what the patients want to listen to, and we always enjoy that music too.”

Once a patient lodges their request, a nurse finds the artist on one of the music streaming services on their phone and connects it to a small speaker that has more than enough power to make the music audible to everyone in the procedure room.

Music can be as effective as traditional calming techniques, such as warming. A 2019 Penn Medicine study, for example, showed that music reduced patient anxiety as well as midazolam did.

• Settle up beforehand. There’s nothing comfortable about speaking with a patient about whether they owe money. The timing of that conversation, however, can determine how financially stressed a patient might feel just before their surgery.

That’s why Eye 35 calls all patients before their procedures to let them know if they owe money or not. If they do owe, attempts are made to get them to pay over the phone during that call. This not only streamlines their registration process on their day of surgery, but also takes one more stressor off their plate so they can try to relax on that day.

“We make the calls to all patients, even if they don’t owe anything,” says Ms. McCafferty. “We tell those patients they’re fully covered to ease their mind. If they have a co-pay, taking care of it beforehand means they won’t have to worry about bringing their wallet and can just arrive on surgery day, fill out a few forms and have their procedure done.”

If Eye 35 patients express any trouble regarding payment during the phone call, creative financing solutions can be discussed in advance. These include health and wellness credit cards and, in some cases, explorations of a payment plan with a final payment due before the second eye procedure, says Ms. McCafferty.

As you know, many patients would rather not be having surgery at all, and ultimately would rather not even be at your (or any other) facility. For many outpatient centers, however, they are electing to have their procedure. That means they chose your facility, even if they were just following their doctor’s recommendation.

The more pleasant their experience, the more likely they will provide free word-of-mouth advertising for you that can drive more patients your way. It’s a wonderful opportunity not only to grow your business, but also to serve more members of your community with your outstanding care. OSM