Speaker 1: Hi there, welcome to the Health Analytic Insights podcast. This podcast is all about creating a community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about the field of health informatics. I hope to share information and advice in topics such as health analytics, digital health, biomedical engineering, and data visualization in healthcare. And in exchange, I would love to hear from you, dear listener, about your experience and interest in this field. You can drop me a line at healthanalyticinsights at gmail.com, and this email, along with any references discussed during this podcast will be listed in the show notes below. If this resonates with you, don't forget to follow and subscribe to this podcast as I'll be releasing new episodes bi-weekly. So in this episode of the Health Analytic Insights podcast, I'll be talking about patient satisfaction scores, a common health analytic metric. This episode is part of a series I'm doing deep diving into common health analytic metrics within the health informatics field. In previous episodes, I talked about re-admission rates and emergency department wait times, how they are calculated, and some of the systemic issues that might be contributing to these metrics not just focused on the hospital itself, but of the wider society, as well as some novel solutions that have been developed. So in this episode, I will talk about patient satisfaction scores. And this information can be collected in many different formats, a generic form asking for your feedback on a hospital website, or a more national survey such as the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, which is an American standardized survey publicly reported of patients' perspectives of hospital care. And this particular survey asks discharged patients 29 questions about their recent hospital stay. And the survey contains 19 core questions about critical aspects of patients' hospital experiences. For example, how was the communication between nurses and doctors, the responsiveness of hospital staff, the cleanliness and quietness of the hospital environment, communication about medicines, discharge information, overall rating of the hospital, and would they recommend the hospital, to name a few of the core questions. And collecting feedback from patients can be an important measure of the quality of care received, although sometimes when you think about the reviews that we see on Google, it can be weighted towards very positive or negative experiences, and so it might be biased towards a certain experience. But as previously discussed, patient wait times can have an effect on patient satisfaction scores. So a lot of these metrics are interconnected and have certain correlations with each other, and that's why it can be very interesting to get a whole host of different metrics to really tell you the story of hospital and clinical care. For instance, one article that I read detailed the impact of waiting times on patient satisfaction scores, and I will leave a link to the study in the show notes of the episode, and how this affected the patient's perception of the quality of care and physician's abilities. So some of the results from the study found that exam room waiting times had a more pronounced negative effect on satisfaction scores than time spent in the waiting room, and first time patients were particularly sensitive to longer wait times. So the article details that longer wait times in the exam room could diminish patient's perception of a physician's capabilities and decrease the confidence in care provided. So this is a key finding to note, and as hospitals continue to grow, offer more care and services to a growing population, the need to be data-driven will be key. And some of the lessons that we see companies in different industries, such as the hospitality or the banking industries, that they employ when it comes to improving customer retention rates and satisfaction with their products or services, might be used in the context of the healthcare experience to improve satisfaction scores. So I was first encouraged to read Reframing Healthcare by Dr. Zeev Nirwit. I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly, but again, I'll link the book in the show notes of the episode. So I was first encouraged to read this book when I interviewed Daniel Yeboah, who is the founder and general manager of Alerka Health Corp, on the podcast. And I think that the book makes some really excellent points on how to transform healthcare delivery and how patients currently receive care and how it can be improved. And I believe that this will have a positive effect on patient satisfaction scores if there's some analysis done on how healthcare is delivered. So in the book, Dr. Zeev makes the point that we should reframe our mindset when it comes to healthcare delivery to more of a marketing mindset of rebranding, redesigning, and reorganizing. In terms of the health informatics field, this makes me think of how we can get feedback from the patient, not just at the end of care, through the patient satisfaction survey, sending them a response form to see how their experience was, but even throughout the care, right when they first arrive, during their stay, and then also when they leave or discharge, following the journey of the patient, by understanding where the breakdown in care happens, by highlighting that in a dashboard or report, health informatics professionals and managers can understand which areas should be targeted. For example, when patients first arrive at the hospital, are they having issues finding parking? Is it difficult to navigate which department they should find? Was it difficult to book an appointment, et cetera? These are all areas that could be targeted and work to improve healthcare delivery. So this is just a brief overview of some factors to reflect on when it comes to patient satisfaction scores. And the purpose of this health analytic metric deep dive is that at the end of the series, I'll be creating a hospital key performance indicator dashboard in Power BI, which will include all the metrics which I've mentioned during the series. I've heard from many of you that you're looking to create a project that you can link to in your resume when job searching, and understanding the metrics that will be on this dashboard is the first step. In the next episode, we will continue to talk about patient satisfaction scores and how to employ natural language processing tools to obtain more information from open text fields. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to the Health Analytic Insights podcast. I'd love to hear from you about topics I should cover in future episodes. Please consider subscribing and leaving a review. Have a wonderful day.