Ensuring that patients receive the best possible quality of care is among the key objectives that healthcare providers endeavor to achieve. Levels of patient satisfaction offer the providers insights into the impact that the services that they offer are having on patients. There are a number of reasons why measuring patient satisfaction is important. The fact that the measures of patient satisfaction challenge providers to initiate quality improvement programs is among the reasons (Al-Abri & Al-Balushi, 2014). For example, when a hospital determines that a majority of its patients finds its services to be costly and of poor quality, the hospital can take steps to address the concerns that the patients have raised. Another issue that makes measuring patient satisfaction important is that it enables providers to manage costs (Ilioudi, Lazakidou & Tsironi, 2013). By seeking the views of their patients regarding the cost and quality of service, providers are able to keep costs down while offering the patients value for their money.
Now that the importance of measuring patient satisfaction has been established, focus can shift to identifying the tools, metrics and forms of measuring and tracking the patient experience in different settings. Patient-reported measures are among the primary forms of assessing the patient experience (LaVela & Gallan, 2014). Essentially, using this approach, the provider obtains feedback from patients regarding their experience. The feedback could address such issues as the level of warmth that the patient received and the effectiveness of the services that were offered. Generally, the patient-reported measures enable providers to determine the impact of their services. However, this approach can be unreliable given that patients have varying expectations, needs and demands. Assessment of performance indicators is another form of measuring and tracking the patient experience (Male et al., 2017). Length of hospital stay, the cost of care and incidences of hospital-acquired infections are some of the indicators that enable providers to track the patient experience. For example, if the hospital observes that patients are spending more days receiving treatment, the hospital has a basis to feel that its services are not having the desired impact, and that quality improvement should be implemented. In my practice, I have adopted various approaches as I seek to evaluate the patient experience. These approaches include speaking with the patients directly and using such metrics as the cost of care. Since I have found these approaches to be effective and reliable, I would strongly urge other medical professionals to integrate them into their service delivery.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
References
Al-Abri, R., & Al-Balushi, A. (2014). Patient satisfaction survey as a tool towards quality improvement. Oman Medical Journal, 29 (1), 3-7.
Ilioudi, S., Lazakidou, A., & Tsironi, M. (2013). Importance of patient satisfaction measurement and electronic surveys: methodology and potential benefits. International Journal of Health Research and Innovation, 1 (1), 67-87.
LaVela, S. L., & Gallan, A. S. (2014). Evaluation and measurement of patient experience. Patient Experience Journal, 1 (1), 28-36.
Male, L., Noble, A., Atkinson, J., & Marson, T. (2017). Measuring patient experience: a systematic review to evaluate psychometric properties of patient reported experience measures (PREMs) for emergency care service provision. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 29 (3), 314-26.
