Survey tools
Physicians can use a number of tools for collecting patient feedback, whether designing, conducting, and analyzing surveys themselves or hiring a vendor to do it for them. TMA does not endorse a particular vendor, but TMA Director of Clinical Advocacy Angelica Ybarra says the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ’s) Consumer Assess- ment of Healthcare Providers and Sys- tems (CAHPS) survey, used by Medicare, is the industry standard. The CAHPS survey is available at no
cost. Find it and other patient experi- ence resources on TMA’s website, www
.texmed.org/patientsafety. Because the CAHPS surveys are specific to certain care settings, such as hospitals, dialysis units, or physician offices, look for the CAHPS Clinician & Group Surveys (CG- CAHPS), which are applicable to phy- sician practices. MGMA also has a free patient satisfaction benchmarking tool based on the CAHPS survey available at
http://data.mgma.com/PtSat/rdPage .aspx.
Christine Crofton, PhD, a CAHPS
project officer at AHRQ, says the survey favors the use of what she calls “patient experience” questions over “patient sat- isfaction” questions. She explains that patient satisfaction questions focus on providing just one type of information — a gross measure of the quality of care given by a medical professional, such as a patient’s willingness to recommend a physician on a 1- to 10-point scale or a patient’s rating of a health care profes- sional as the ‘best’ or ‘worst’ they have experienced. Patient experience questions elicit
more detailed and specific information on particular aspects of care, including:
• A physician’s communication skills, such as the ability to listen carefully to the patient, explain medication or treatment options in ways the patient understands, and show respect for what the patient has to say;
• Access to care, including how easy it is for the patient to get an appoint- ment during regular office hours or after office hours, or with a specialist; • Courtesy and helpfulness of staff; or
Getting patient perspective
The American Academy of Family Physicians offers this guid- ance on conducting patient satisfaction surveys:
• Questionnaires should elicit information to help you under- stand your patients’ needs as they relate to your office pro- cesses and service level. While you could create the survey yourself, experts recommend using one that has already been tested and validated.
• Online surveys can be inexpensive and minimize staff burden because no one has to key in survey responses. However, you must provide patients with the URL, and patients must take the initiative to get on the computer and complete the survey.
• Printed surveys cost more and require more time because someone must key in responses. However, this method may be best if many of your patients don’t have computer access.
• Telephone surveys are time-intensive: Someone must call patients, go through the survey, and key in survey responses. But they allow patient opinions to be probed in-depth.
• Choose a sampling strategy: You could survey periodically, for example, and distribute questionnaires quarterly to all patients seen in a given week. Or you could seek feedback continually, for example, by giving the questionnaire to every 10th patient in the office.
• Distribute surveys in a random fashion, not just to patients who likely had positive experiences, so you can get feedback to help your practice improve.
• Survey on busy days and slow days because the patient ex- perience may be different.
• If you decide to survey on your own, without the help of an outside vendor, consider the workload implications of devel- oping, conducting, and analyzing the survey.
• If you decide to get outside help, gather information about the companies that interest you, get references from them, and discuss the decision with others in your practice.
• When you analyze the results, identify problems in office processes and patient service to target for improvement.
March 2014 TEXAS MEDICINE 51
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