The best and most successful businesses are in tune with the needs and wishes of their customer base. With all of the different theories of management, the one business concept that has held up for generations of time is that in order to be successful, you must have quality outcomes and exemplary customer service as the two fundamental focal points when conducting your daily business activities. This is especially true in today’s competitive medical environment.
If quality outcomes and exemplary customer service are so important to business survival, how is your practice measuring patient satisfaction and quality assurance performance each and every day? Most practices are still using old-fashioned paper surveys to gain information about the patient’s visit. In our current world of high technology, we find this methodology detrimental. What type of message are you sending to your patient base when you are using this outdated way of acquiring valuable information related to customer satisfaction? Does this send the right message to the patient when you are positioning your practice as a high-end technologically oriented organization that offers premium out of pocket services? On the contrary, there are some other practices that will ask patients to logon to their website to provide the practice with feedback on their most recent visit. However, this procedure typically has a very low response rate (less than 5%) and the data being collected is most often retrospective in nature. With this type of approach, negative comments can end up on the Internet without giving management the opportunity to promptly defuse any disparities before they become a problem for the practice.
So what can you do today to obtain immediate feedback on your patients’ “real time” experience at your practice? In our consulting travels, we have discovered a company that has perfected a tool that displays real time data on the patient’s experience that is easy to use, seamless in operations and it is very cost effective. The Humm Systems was developed for, and is now used extensively, in the restaurant business. It has been reengineered for the medical arena and offers the following advantages over anything that we have seen on the market:
- Provides the practice with authentic feedback on real time performance
- Decreases negative comments that are posted online by 43% or more
- Tracks the individual performance of a staff member or provider
- Improves the overall quality of service
- Quick, seamless, easy to use in a cloud based environment that provides real time back-end analytics
- Acts as an email gateway to educate the patient on premium or new services
- HIPAA compliant
The Humm Systems allows you to customize your own survey questions and promote special procedures and events. The IPad device is provided to the patient at checkout and it usually takes the patient less than a minute to answer the survey questions and the computer immediately provides the practice with real time analytics from that visit. It has been our experience that approximately 85% of patients have agreed to participate in the Humm Systems survey; a very high acceptance rate! With the patient’s permission, comments can be directly uploaded to the practice’s Facebook page. In addition, the Humm Systems can be a great vehicle to ensure more positive comments about the practice are posted on the Internet that will boost the practice’s reputation.
Royce Labor, the CEO of the Eye Consultants of Texas, refers to the Humm Systems as “a superb addition to our customer service toolbox.” He goes on to say that “Humm is a great tool and I highly and enthusiastically recommend it to any medical practice looking to track and improve their patient’s experience.”
If you would like to learn how Humm Systems can help you monitor and improve your meaningful patient feedback, contact us for more information. You may also contact Joe Carroll at Advantage Administration, Inc. 866-217-4214.