The Impact and Importance of Patient Satisfaction Scores in Healthcare (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: How important are patient satisfaction scores? Because there's been facilities I worked at that are like, we need to boost our patient satisfaction scores. You have to do everything you can around these patients to boost them up. But then other facilities are like, you know, don't worry too much about them. They're not that big of a deal. So are they really that important to facilities or is it just you get like funding from it? How do patient satisfaction scores influence like a facility?

Speaker 2: Depends on, and this is like, there's so many stakeholders of healthcare, right? Depending on who you're asking, their importance is different. But if you're a health insurance, patient satisfaction can be in the forum if you get the rating that you'd want. So people see that in the marketplace and sign up for you. So there's a lot of things on the line, right? Are they going to choose you or not? If you're a provider, patient experience could be one of the factors that patients decide to come to you or another place. So it's like an external rating system, right? It's imperfect. And I would probably fall in between making the patient experience score or like do everything you can to improve it versus let's not think about it twice. And I think there's a way to approach it with the growth mindset where you look at it and ask yourself, hey, like, is there something that I'm doing repeatedly? Because actually the score is just a marker and there's a lot of information if you dig into it, right? That says, I'll just, again, speak from my perspective because it varies depending on your department. As a clinician doing outpatient medicine, there are like eight or nine questions and there are different categories. One is, did my doctor make me feel like I care for it? Or did they review my medications with me? Was my follow-up plan clear? So I could look at my data and then look, hey, my experience is okay. And then, wow, like the follow-up plan, like there's so many patients that aren't clear with me. So then I can reflect and say, like, how can I make that clearer and better for my patients? Or is that a system issue? Like they just can't get back in to see me. So you can use that score as a marker for improvements and see where you're falling short or could get better. Because we're all trying to get better one way or another, right? Yeah.