5 Ways to use SMS Surveys for Patient Feedback

It is probably not a thought that comes to your mind immediately — taking feedback from patients. After all, this isn’t hospitality and patients come for treatments to their ailments. But if you really think about it — even patients are spoilt for choice now. They can easily switch to a clinic or healthcare center that is good, is clean, has doctors and policies that agree with them and is overall taking care of patients beyond just appointments and treatment. What patients feel about your hospital really matters and it affects their opinion, their recommendations to others and if they’d return or not. 

Patient Feedback system establishes the relationship between patients’ perception of care and quality of hospital.

The importance of patient feedback is manifold. Patient feedback really helps you quickly identify the gaps in patient care and rectify it to improve the patient experience. But like everything else, effectiveness of patient feedback also revolves around the accuracy of data collection and the promptness of action by the right stakeholders.

At Zonka Feedback, we work with a lot of healthcare organisations and clinics and they all align in their vision to get patient feedback. But the channels they choose to send their feedback form differs. This is based on a lot of reasons like type and age of patients that visit you, how much time are they spending before and after their appointment, the kind of feedback the hospital is looking at getting (regarding the appointment, or how well did the doctor do or more detailed) and many more such reasons.

One way that has really become popular now is through taking feedback by sending SMS Surveys. Before I share some great (and effective) ways for you to get patient feedback using SMSes, I would like to quickly highlight why SMS Surveys are so popular now and some of their benefits.

• Easy to set up — Compare it to setting up devices to take feedback at the hospital, SMS Surveys are easier to set up. With a good SMS Survey Software, you can get started in less than 30 minutes!
• Cost-effective — You don’t need any hardware to get started sending SMS Surveys.
• High Response Rate — With SMS Surveys, you are likely to get a High Response Rate for feedback.
• Quicker & more Honest Responses —When patients are not pressed for time to fill out surveys and feedback forms on premises and can do it at their own time and in their space, they are likely to be more honest and detailed with their response.

Let’s find out when you can send SMS Surveys to Patient to get feedback.

5 Ways to Collect Effective Patient Feedback using SMS Surveys

With SMS Surveys, you can reach your patients after different interactions to gauge their experience effectively and promptly. Here are 5 different surveys that you can send to patients using SMS Surveys

1. Patient Satisfaction Surveys
2. Health Monitoring Surveys
3. Post Appointment SMS Surveys (for outpatients)
4. Post Discharge SMS Surveys (for inpatients)
5. Patient Net Promoter Score

Patient Satisfaction Surveys

With Satisfaction Surveys, healthcare providers can easily asses how happy and satisfied patients were on various parameters. These are ideal as post appointment and post treatment surveys to get patient feedback about ease of booking an appointment, experience with the doctor and physician, satisfaction with the overall treatment, quality of care, cleanliness and upkeep of the premise.

A patient satisfaction feedback result can help you identify both individual problems as well as recurring issues with quality of care and treatment.

Health Monitoring Surveys

In this emerging, rapidly evolving situation of COVID-19, there is a lot of extreme pressure on doctors and caregivers to safeguard the best experience and ensure the best care to the patient. To achieve this, lots of healthcare centers are now monitoring high-risk patient quickly through the health monitoring surveys. They send health monitoring surveys to pre-screen patients for symptoms related to COVID 19 via SMSes before or while check-in.

While for COVID 19 screening, the questions are centered around the symptoms of the virus, generally Health Monitoring Survey can include various health assessment questions like blood pressure, weight, sugar level, and more. This enable your healthcare team to pre-assess the problem based on the symptoms being faced by the patient. It also helps in providing high quality care & treatment and track the patients’ progress during visits.

Post Appointment SMS Surveys (for Outpatients)

There are a series of experiences your patients encounter before, during, and post-appointment. The experience could be related to efficiency and friendliness of the staff, experience with doctors, availability of medicines at the pharmacy, etc. here, post-appointment patient feedback helps you to track whether patients’ experience are good and bad with you.

SMS Survey provides you with an opportunity to identify the recurring patient issues and make amends in improving patient satisfaction. Using Zonka Feedback, you can easily connect your survey system to your internal systems and send automated Post Appointment Patient Surveys through SMSes to get patient’s feedback about appointment time, staff, doctor and treatment right after their appointment.

Post Discharge SMS Surveys (for Inpatients)

Tracking the endpoint of the patient’s journey with you as a healthcare service provider can help you to improve your healthcare services and enhance the level of the care and treatment you provide to your patients. Post-discharge SMS surveys helps you to understand the level of the care and treatment you are providing to your patients.

For example, you can send discharge surveys through SMSes to the relatives or spouse of the patient to closely monitor various other important care aspects like staff efficiency and friendliness, experience with the doctor, availability of medicines at the pharmacy and much more. This measures the real-time core satisfaction level of the in-patient at a transactional level and yourself abreast of your patients’ needs and expectations.

Patient Net Promoter Score

Healthcare organizations are finding success with measuring the Patient Loyalty and it can be achieved through gauging the patient experience along with the satisfaction. Thus, the straightforward way of summarizing patient experiences and satisfaction is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). You can easily gauge your patient experience and satisfaction at a transactional level (post-appointment, post-discharge, post-doctor consultation) by asking simple NPS question that “How likely is it that you would recommend our healthcare services to a friend or colleague?”

How to use Zonka Feedback to send SMS Surveys to Patients

Zonka Feedback’s SMS channel enables you to send NPS or CSAT surveys to both In and Outpatients of your hospital.

In just 5 easy steps you can send SMS surveys to your patient using Zonka Feedback:

1. Create your Free Account at Zonka Feedback
2. You’ll immediately be asked to create a survey as soon as you login. Choose from one of the expert templates or create a survey from scratch.
3. Customize your survey to add company branding as well as any questions you’d like to ask.
4. Once done, click to distribute your survey via SMS
5. Add recipients’ mobile numbers or upload your contacts (if you’re sending it to a lot of people). Alternatively, you can also use APIs and Webhooks as well to connect to your favourite tools.
6. Preview and Send.

Once you’ve sent your survey via SMS, you can track SMS deliveries, response rate, look at responses in real-time, set up notifications and alerts for Patient Feedback and get in-depth Patient Feedback Analysis.

Originally published at https://www.zonkafeedback.com/