With healthcare rapidly moving from a fee-for-service to a pay-for-performance model, it’s critical for hospitals and other healthcare organizations to make sense of their data analytics and apply the findings to enhance service delivery. Knowing which metrics to focus on can be challenging when you have a wealth of data to choose from, however, you can now use AI to help you with that.
Here are the ones that matter most.
User Experience (UX)
You can’t measure the satisfaction of clients you don’t have, so getting them in through the door is paramount. That depends—partly, anyway—on how good their experience with your marketing is, particularly your website, social media profiles and other forms of promotion. Measuring UX effectively enables you to determine where improvements are needed, in ways such as using technology to address social, environmental, and community health factors and how they affect patient health.
Customer Engagement
Keeping patients engaged in their treatment gives them a sense of ownership and makes them stakeholders in their healthcare. Measuring the effectiveness of this process is important, because without it you won’t know how well the care you’re prescribing and delivering is being adhered to.
Tracking these metrics enables you to not only scale your efforts and achieve better outcomes, but to help more people. For example, the data collected enables you to develop targeted, automated communications that provide patients with additional information relevant to their treatment plans. That, in turn, increases the likelihood of their engagement, so it’s an ongoing cycle.
Treatment Outcomes
You can provide the best treatment processes in the world, but unless you know what the outcomes are you won’t be able to make adjustments. Hard outcomes data is an important metric for accountability, so it’s usually tracked for reporting purposes.
There’s more benefit to be gained from it, however, especially in the value-based arena. That’s because when the patient is paying (or authorizing the release of payment) the outcome often determines whether this happens or not. Measuring outcomes—and patient satisfaction with them—is vital for guiding future treatment and patient management strategies.
Patient Satisfaction
It’s not all just about getting paid. Patient satisfaction is a primary driver of organizational improvement in healthcare settings, according to the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC). Some reasons for this are:
- Satisfied patients share positive experiences with five others, but unhappy patients complain to nine or more other people—a powerful word-of-mouth component.
- Because of high patient acquisition costs, losing a patient is a significant loss of investment in marketing, administrative processes, clinical interactions, lab test revenue, and potentially, pharmaceutical purchases.
- A reciprocal relationship exists between patient dissatisfaction and complaints, which increases your risk of malpractice lawsuits.
Patient satisfaction metrics gathered through surveys helps increase patient engagement, reduce costs, enrich your data, and give providers real-time feedback and opportunities to improve their services and decrease risks. It also ensures higher HCAHPS scores, which are linked to higher reimbursement, reduces readmission rates, improves patient loyalty, and gives your organization a competitive edge.
For more help with your marketing, contact the experts at Wax Custom Communications by calling 305-350-5700 or visiting waxcom.com.
