Many practices frown on the idea of a post-visit survey. Many feel that it will inconvenience their patients or take too much time from staff. Others are just not interested in getting true feedback from their patients.
We believe that patient surveys are a great tool both for gaining insight into how patients view your organization and for extending your relationship with the patient. Surveys don’t have to be long and daunting, they don’t even have to be on paper. Today, a practice can create a short email survey using a free or low priced tool like Survey Monkey. You can even set the survey up to be anonymous so the patient is comfortable giving true feedback. Using a digital survey also removes the need for staff to tally the results. You can log into your survey account at any time and see statistics on response trends. You can also read the individual survey responses if you want to dig deeper into how patients feel about your business.
While a survey can take time from both the practice and the patient, it also comes with a number of benefits. We have listed some of the biggest benefits below:
- It will help understand how your staff and practice are performing.
- It shows patients they matter and you care about their experience with your practice.
- It helps set a framework for extending your relationship with your patient outside of the office visit.
- It can be another opportunity to inform patients about your email list or social media accounts. You can even offer built-in opportunities to connect. This works great because they are taking the survey on some sort of device where it is easy to link to these other services.
- It can provide an opportunity to request online patient reviews. These are critical for your local search engine optimization and they are hard to get. We find that often people will leave them as an extension of the survey.
- It can provide you with insight into how your patients found your office.
- Patients can provide critical feedback that can help your practice better compete with other practices they have interacted with. You also have a chance to respond to negative feedback before it translates into negative online reviews!
These are just a few of the biggest benefits we have found to patient surveys. If you still aren’t a believer, we suggest you give it a try anyway. We challenge you to collect 25 survey responses and tell us you don’t see the value in surveying your healthcare patients post visit.
