How to Improve Patient Satisfaction: 5 Tips

Learning how to improve patient satisfaction goes beyond pursuing better scores on follow-up surveys. It’s about ensuring the best possible experience during someone’s most difficult moments.

Hospitals (and other healthcare facilities) are often portrayed as cold, bleak, and even frightening. With rooms and beds that fail to offer anything resembling the comforts of home and a team of staff too busy or stressed to always provide the most compassionate approach, the patient experience can be nerve-wracking and uncomfortable.

By prioritizing innovative ways to improve patient experiences, healthcare organizations can increase the likelihood of optimizing patient satisfaction and health outcomes, while maintaining the highest degree of safety standards. We’ll help you get there by describing what it means to really focus on patient satisfaction in healthcare, alongside five key methods for ensuring your patients feel supported, safe, and valued when they need it most.

How Does the Patient Experience Affect Satisfaction?

Although patient satisfaction and experiences are interrelated, they’re not the same. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) defines the patient experience as the range of interactions the patient has with the healthcare system. Satisfaction refers to a patient’s perception of how those experiences lived up to their expectations.

Establishing how to improve patient satisfaction often involves managing (in addition to meeting, or exceeding) those expectations. This can be done by employing strategies that address eight key aspects of care, appreciated by patients.

Access to Care

When care is more accessible, patients are able to get the services they need in a timely manner. Accessibility can be improved through an online appointment booking system or mail-order prescriptions, for example.

Courtesy and Respect

Patients have more trust in providers who treat them with kindness and respect. This all comes down to how staff interact with patients, from giving a warm introduction to attentively listening to a patient’s concerns.

Care Coordination

Effective coordination between providers prevents unnecessary delays or gaps in care. When discharging a patient, staff should ensure that they’re following up with the patient’s primary care provider, pharmacy, and any other ancillary services that they’ll need for recovery.

Culturally Appropriate Care

All patients want to feel safe in their care environments, and staff must be respectful to different cultural backgrounds. Using interpreters for patients who speak other languages can be a great way to provide more inclusive, patient-centered care.

Communication With Clinicians

Clear and open communication can help patients feel more comfortable expressing their needs. Staff can foster this by using simple language that breaks down medical jargon in an understandable way.

Getting Information

Patients value being kept in the loop about their own health. Delivering clear patient education, communicating test results in a timely manner, and providing detailed discharge instructions can help reduce any uncertainty that patients have about their care.

Shared Decision Making

Patients want to be involved in decisions regarding their care. It’s important that providers clearly present and explain different treatment options to patients so that they can make an informed decision based on their personal preferences.

Self-Management Support

When patients have the right tools and support, they’re able to more effectively self-manage their health conditions. For example, some providers give patients with diabetes access to an app that helps them track glucose levels and medication schedules.

Hospital administrators who focus on these eight elements can make great gains toward improving patient satisfaction. However, it can be challenging for facilities to understand the significance of these factors in the context of healthcare management.

What Is the Significance of Patient Satisfaction in Healthcare?

Effectively translating healthcare’s core principles (like safety or compassion) into high-quality care requires understanding how patients feel. If a patient sees a bug on the ground and decides that the facility is dirty, it won’t matter how perfectly their clinicians employed standard precautions. Patient satisfaction examples bridge the gap between professional vs. patient perceptions, revealing authentic ways to increase patient satisfaction that center their experience.

The Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) program helps conduct surveys that compile hospital satisfaction ratings and experience data. Results are posted publicly for patients to reference when choosing where to receive care.

It’s important for hospitals to address feedback on how to improve patient satisfaction in order to protect their reputation and viability. The following table outlines examples of core items measured to reflect the patient’s perception (and, later, guide facilities on how to improve patient experiences in healthcare).

How Do Facilities Benefit From Higher Patient Satisfaction?

Improving patient satisfaction and experiences is associated with many organizational and patient benefits. In healthcare settings, some of the most obvious advantages include clinical and financial incentives that encourage administrators to ensure that patients are satisfied with their care.

Clinical benefits include:

• Improved patient outcomes.
• Greater patient adherence to recommendations on treatments and medications.
• Better patient self-management for disease prevention.

Financial incentives include:

• Higher reimbursement payments (funded by CMS value-based purchasing initiatives and Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement policies).
• Lower rates of employee turnover.
• Fewer malpractice payouts.

With this understanding of why it’s important to focus on how to improve patient experiences, let’s dive into some creative ways to increase patient satisfaction at your facility.

How to Improve Patient Satisfaction: 5 Key Initiatives

When exploring answers to tough questions that focus on primarily subjective data, it can be difficult to know where to begin. You already know that the best starting place is the patient’s own input. However, if you’re looking to take immediate action, here are five common frustration points to target.

1. Minimize Wait Times

Optimizing patient flow and maximizing staffing efficiency can help reduce wait times.

In the event of any delays, communicate with the patient and give an estimated treatment time. Studies show that when patients are notified of long wait times and delays, hospitals receive better patient experience scores.

Tip: Provide a clean, comfortable space with plenty of natural light for patients while they wait.

2. Establish Compassionate Rapport

Patients appreciate it when healthcare staff show an interest in their care. In addition to actively listening and speaking with an empathetic tone, providers can build better nonverbal behaviors. When educating staff on how to improve patient satisfaction (with communication), stress the importance of maintaining eye contact, keeping conversations face-to-face, and including relaxed facial expressions and body posturing.

Also, giving each patient the time and attention they deserve is important. Try to minimize rushing to the next room when providing education, and always confirm that the patient understands your teaching prior to exiting.

Tip: Consider methods like Schwartz Rounds for helping your employees avoid compassion fatigue and remain emotionally available in their practice.

3. Incorporate Healthcare Technology Into Your Plan of Care

Advanced communication and scheduling technologies make it easy for your patient to receive information on their treatments, medications, and appointments on a phone or tablet. Making it easier for patients to be involved in their care improves outcomes and reduces facility spending.

Online patient portals are convenient for distributing personalized health information (test results, radiology images, etc.). Linking reliable, evidence-based scientific resources to your hospital’s website can help patients understand their health data.

Tip: Patients are more likely to respond to surveys and be on time for appointments if forms are able to be filled out online.

4. Optimize Staff Morale

Happier healthcare providers provide better care for their patients. To improve patient experience, facility leaders must also improve staff satisfaction scores and work-life balance. Helping staff members feel engaged and empowered at work is a key way to make patients feel cared for.

Tip: A staff satisfaction priority is often scheduling flexibility. Consider ways to enhance the consistency of your employees working their preferred shifts.

5. Frequently Assess Patient Feedback for Opportunities to Improve

The first survey shouldn’t be the last, nor should growth be a one-time event. CAHPS surveys comprise one method of helping patients feel heard, but hospitals are encouraged to collect their own patient experience data to ensure quality care and find areas of improvement. You can create paper surveys, discharge phone call questionnaires, or solicit online feedback to compile details.

Tip: Implement a standardized, organization-wide feedback prompt, using a quality template, so that data can be shared and used more effectively across units or departments.

Discover More Ways to Improve the Patient Experience at Your Facility

Understanding how to improve patient satisfaction before a problem presents in surveys can help your facility stand out among the rest. For other proactive innovation, we can help with our wide range of facility guides and best practice tips for providing top level patient care.