As a long-term care home, your goal is to offer comfortable and safe living spaces that translate into great experiences. Because, with great experiences comes greater satisfaction, a pivotal role in the success of your care home. In this blog, to better understand the value of patient satisfaction we’re highlighting 5 ways it drives a direct return on investment (ROI). Further, we’re uncovering how you can begin measuring experience to ensure greater satisfaction.
The Return on Investment (ROI) of Patient Satisfaction in Long Term Care
Patient Retention
One of the greatest ways satisfaction drives return is through patient retention. If your patients feel valued and are happy with the experience, they’ll stay and in most instances, recommend your accommodations to family and friends.
Sound Reputation
Deciding on a long-term care home is a tedious decision, with a handful of homes up for consideration. Reputation, for most, is a swaying factor in selection. Families want to know their loved ones are taken care of and patients want confidence in knowing they made the right decision.
Greater Spend On-Property
At your facility, you offer a lot of great services and amenities that patients can use to make the most of their experience. By offering a great experience that leads to high satisfaction, patients are deterred from spending money off-property. As an example, if satisfaction is high in your dining hall, they’ll likely visit again. In contrast, if satisfaction is low in your dining hall odds are patients will look elsewhere when it comes to selecting a place to eat for the night.
Happier Employees
There’s no arguing that the patient and employee experiences are heavily intertwined. Your nurses and front-line staff are consistently communicating and serving your patients – so it isn’t difficult for negative sentiments to transfer. With greater patient satisfaction, comes better employee experiences, leading to happier staff and better workplace environments.
A Competitive Advantage
Today’s long-term care homes face an incredibly competitive landscape. While there are features and amenities you can incorporate that add to the value of your home, customer satisfaction outweighs them by a landslide. As previously mentioned, at the end of the day, families want to know their loved ones are taken care of – showcasing satisfaction, along with safety, gives you one of the largest competitive advantages.
Win New Patients
Greater satisfaction and the returns mentioned all contribute to winning new patients. Firstly, the happier your current patients are the more likely they will recommend your facility. Secondly, satisfaction translates in almost everything you do, happier employees, a well-kept establishment and competitive advantage all put you at the frontlines of winning new, direct business.
How You Can Start Measuring Patient Satisfaction
Evidently, satisfaction plays a monumental role in the success of your long-term care home,
so how can you be sure you’re driving happy patients?
It starts with measuring the patient experience.
Measuring, by way of asking patients how they feel about their experience, can be done through consistent and engaging surveys. By collecting responses you can identify trends and opportunities for improvement. In this section, we’re sharing how you can begin measuring patient experiences, to learn how you can better tailor your services and transform satisfaction.
Use Accessible and Engaging Channels
While it used to be commonplace to request feedback in person or via paper, today’s channel preferences are much different. With a whole host of online and in-person channels, it’s important to understand what is accessible for your patients. This may require some research of your cohort and what’s convenient in your establishment.
As a long-term care home, a mix of in-person kiosks, QR codes on printed collateral, and online messaging platforms can help you reach more people and extract the most information.
Keep Touchpoints Top of Mind
The location where you ask for feedback on your experience is just as important as the channel. By leveraging multiple touchpoints you can get specific in improvements, as well as highlight over and underperforming areas of your establishment.
When deciding on your touchpoints, consider key moments of the patient experience like dining halls, medical rooms, common lounges, or gyms.
Ask Diverse Questions
Simply asking your patients if they’re satisfied isn’t enough. To make any improvement you need to know why, and the context of the response. In addition to the typical CSAT question type, consider asking questions relevant to a touchpoint or care provider and incorporate long-form question types to better understand perspective. The more specific you get, the more insight you’ll have to better the experience and improve satisfaction.
Regularly Monitor Data
As you’re measuring the experience remember to regularly monitor data. Whether on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, this allows you to evolve your offerings and consistently meet customer preferences. As your program grows, you can set benchmarks and set recurring dates to review data and strategize.
As an example, with the Loop Experience Platform, you can share real-time insights with employees on shift for an immediate resolution. Further, teams can enable dashboard subscriptions to receive a regular cadence of data sent to their inbox. Selecting a specific day, time, and data set, emails are automated – so you’re always in the know.
The Loop Experience Platform Difference
Knowing what makes your patients happy and consistently delivering on it, is the key to a successful long-term care home, and the Loop Experience Platform, it’s easier than ever.
Using a suite of messaging and measurement tools you can collect feedback and communicate using a wide range of patient-preferred channels. Send specific and actionable, on-brand surveys that speak to your care facility.
With our messaging functionality, you can aggregate messages from kiosks, text messages, web chat, and more, throughout facility touchpoints, all in a single solution. Using real-time visibility, you can respond with context and identify trends – collecting key data along the way to plan operations strategically for the future.
The path to a flourishing care home begins by investing in the patients’ happiness. By taking the time to measure the experience, listen to patient preferences, and take action, you’re well on your way to improving satisfaction.
