Obtaining and using Patient Feedback

Few would dispute that patient feedback is increasingly playing an important role in the improvement of healthcare delivery – nowhere is this more obvious than in the NHS. However techniques to effectively, reliably, and affordably capture patient feedback are relatively unexploited.

The traditional approach to measuring feedback often relies on patients expressing their thoughts verbally or in writing to provide formal or informal feedback in the form of compliments, concerns, and complaints. However, organisations have rarely deployed effective (whole site) feedback campaigns or developed systems to allow informal feedback to be captured/acted upon.

Now, however, patient feedback is very much on the agenda with healthcare providers recognising the important role technology can now play in allowing providers to understand, from the patient’s perspective, what they do well... and identify real improvement opportunities.

Usefully the application of new technology has made gathering patient feedback, on a large scale, both easier and more cost effective. However, technical solutions are not without their flaws.

In order to be valuable, a feedback system needs to address a number of key challenges:

1. How to effectively engage with patients and other stakeholders?
2. How to reduce response bias – i.e. gather and understand the views of patients without the most extreme views?
3. How to use feedback to provide insight – driving improvement activities rather than simply resulting in yet more data for healthcare organisations to interpret.

In order to address these challenges, FeedbackMatters is a unique solution that puts the patient at the heart of its design. FeedbackMatters achieves this in several key ways:

1. Consistent, patient-focussed, branding that emphasises the importance and value of feedback
2. Delivering a system that builds on patients’ goodwill by asking targeted, relevant, clinically developed questions... that emphasise your desire to learn about their experiences.
3. Recognising that no one feedback channel will allow healthcare providers to measure the patient experience across all patient groups, FeedbackMatters offers of a truly integrated multi-channel solutions that avoids the drawbacks of using any single response mechanism. In fact, the flexibility of FeedbackMatters is such that collecting whole site and/or community feedback using the same system is straightforward.
4. Providing both frontline and management with an easy to use FeedbackConsole that presents information – not data – to aid understanding.

In short, FeedbackMatters is different. Interested? Visit FeedbackMatters’ main corporate site at www.crocodilio.com/FeedbackMatters