8 Tips to Establish High Levels of Patient Satisfaction at Your Practice

Patient satisfaction is vital to the growth and success of your practice. The industry is changing and so is the way your patients continue to be happy with their medical care. Here are eight important steps to take to make sure your practice is maintaining high levels of patient satisfaction in 2020.

1) Reminders
Whether or not your patient remembers to come to their appointment or even pay their bill is tied to many different points of frustration. When a patient forgets their appointment, they often accrue unwanted fees or a lapse in important treatment. When this happens, it can decrease overall patient satisfaction, as well as patient engagement. Missed appointments also lead to an increase in wait times that frustrate the patients in your waiting room. Introducing text, email, and phone call reminders are the best ways to make sure you are reminding and engaging your patients so that they can avoid these disappointments.

2) Patient Portal
A quality patient portal is one of the top means of improving patient satisfaction within any practice. Increased access to information and improved understanding are two things that greatly impact how your patients view your practice. With a quality patient portal, providers can increase patient satisfaction by helping individuals better understand their personal health information, their medical bills, and much more. 

3) Visit Alternatives
Becoming more and more relevant each day, patients are seeking medical visit alternatives from their providers. This is seen most from millennial patients who are looking for their providers to offer telehealth and e-visits as options in their care continuum. Offering telehealth at your practice will greatly impact patient satisfaction by offering your patients a convenient way to visit with their physicians during their on-the-go life.

4) Accessible Patient Payments
One of the most prominent contributors to decreased patient satisfaction is the dreaded medical bill. Medical bills are often avoided, unpaid, and unknown for patients who do not plan for their medical costs. The more informed your patients are in regard to their medical bills, and the more options they have to pay them, the more likely they are to make a patient payment and be satisfied with the process. A way that providers can increase patient satisfaction in this area is to introduce more options to make payments. This should include billing integration into your patient portal to allow patients to make payments by credit card online, over the phone, or in person.

5) Payment Plans
For patients who are not financially prepared for unplanned medical expenses, providers must inform them of their options. Most of the time, this means making sure your patients have manageable opportunities should unexpected costs arise. Payment plans are a great way to make sure your patients do not become overwhelmed by medical expenses and to maintain higher levels of patient satisfaction.

6) Chronic Care Management
For your patients battling multiple chronic conditions, coordinating their care and keeping track of all the details can make them immensely unhappy with their medical processes. When their care is not coordinated, it can lead to duplicate testing, unmanageable appointments, and dangerous conflicts in their care plans. By offering Chronic Care Management, providers can not only increase patient satisfaction for these individuals, but also improve the quality of the care they receive, while also increasing revenue.

7) Online Engagement
Providers should make their best effort to create a sense of community with their patients in order to increase patient satisfaction. When your patients are happy with the level of attention they are receiving from their provider, they are more likely to leave a positive footprint online or in person. Engage your patient base via email to keep them up to date on what your practice is offering. Providers who want to boost patient satisfaction, even more, should reach out to patients this way on birthdays and holidays as well.

8) Reduce Wait Times
A reduction in wait times and an increase in one-on-one time is one of the best approaches to increase patient satisfaction. This is achieved in combination with offering visit alternatives like telehealth and reminding your patients of their appointments. It is also achieved by introducing tools like digital patient intake. A digital intake process helps your patients enter all important information prior to their visit, reducing the time spent on this in the office. This process not only reduces wait times, but it also improves the accuracy of the information, as well as the efficiency of your staff's time.

By: Kimberly Von Feldt