When it comes to gaining new patients at senior care facilities and skilled nursing facilities, word of mouth is still king. According to NIC MAP Vision, 70% of all leads come from hospitals, doctors, home care agencies, and other professional organizations.
Residents, their family, and their caregivers may also refer others to your facility, particularly if they have a positive experience. So for obvious reasons, it’s important to take steps to improve the overall patient experience and get more referrals. But how can you do this? It’s simple – start prioritizing patient satisfaction surveys.
Patient Satisfaction Surveys Are A Powerful Tool For Senior Care Organizations
Recently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services eliminated a measure that would make patient satisfaction a part of the SNF Quality Reporting Program, citing lack of support for the change. That means that patient satisfaction surveys won’t be mandatory any time in the near future for skilled nursing facilities and nursing homes.
But this also provides senior living organizations with a great opportunity to create their own patient surveys. If you aren’t doing so already, we highly recommend creating a post-discharge survey that asks patients and family members to rank different aspects of your facilities like cleanliness, facility quality, overall standards of care, staff interactions, visiting experiences, food, and more.
In turn, this can lead to more referrals and a stronger patient base. Why? Because surveys let you know how you’re doing and identify areas of improvement. They also provide metrics that allow you to track your progress as you implement changes based on patient feedback. Let’s get into the details.
Recognize Areas Where Your Senior Care Organization Excels
Firstly, implementing a survey program helps you learn more about where your organization is doing well. Once you start receiving feedback from patients, you can find out where you’re performing well – maybe residents love your social events, or they're pleased with the quality of food or the attentiveness of your staff.
This also can help with your marketing strategy. High patient satisfaction scores can be used to help promote your facility on your website, on social media, with paid web ads, and in traditional marketing channels like TV and billboard ads, too.
Identify Areas Where Your Facility Can Improve
Of course, not everything will be perfect at your facility. There are always areas where you can improve. And unless you’re providing patients with satisfaction surveys, it may not always be easy to identify these problem areas.
For example, you may visit one of your locations and be impressed with how clean it appears that your staff are keeping the facility. But once you start issuing patient satisfaction surveys, you find out that families and patients aren’t happy with the cleanliness of their rooms or certain common areas.
That’s something you can address pretty easily with some policy changes, a more rigorous cleaning schedule, or hiring another janitorial staff member. But without that direct feedback from residents and their families, you may never have known this was an issue – and continued to think that they were happy with the cleanliness of the facility.
No matter how well you think your facility is doing, there’s always room for improvement – and patient satisfaction surveys let you know exactly what they think of your facility, staff, and other elements of their care experience.
You Can Use Survey Results To Track Future Progress And Growth
You can’t know how you’re doing without a roadmap. So once you’ve begun surveying patients and families, the real magic starts to happen. After you collect their data and establish a baseline, you can use it to drive change and continue to make improvements in your facility.
By tracking how patient satisfaction scores change over time, you can determine whether or not certain organizational changes are effective at improving their overall experience. For example, patient satisfaction with social events may improve after you hire a new activities coordinator.
With this data in hand, you can make sure you continue to provide excellent care in the areas where your facility already excels, and you can also continue to shore up and make improvements in the areas where patients report lower satisfaction scores.
Interested In Setting Up Senior Care Patient Surveys? Incept Can Help!
By focusing on patient satisfaction surveys, you can improve the overall patient experience and benefit from more word-of-mouth referrals, too. Not sure where to start? Incept is here to help elder care organizations grow. Give us a call at (330) 649-8000 or contact us online to learn more about our digital marketing solutions for assisted living facilities and skilled nursing facilities today!