By Janis Peiser
Whether you’ve got a newly established practice or are a long-time fixture in your community, you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to improve your operations if you haven’t implemented dental-patient feedback surveys.
Whether you use simple check-box lists or longer forms with space for written feedback, surveys are a great way to make sure you’re meeting the needs of your patients. They allow you to spot problems long before they endanger your practice.
Improving the Relationship Between Dentists and Patients
One of the biggest benefits of a patient survey is the simple fact that you care enough to offer the survey in the first place. Soliciting feedback from your patients sends the positive message that you genuinely value their health-care experience. You’re giving them the freedom to provide important feedback that they might hesitate to bring up face-to-face.
It’s important to remember that two competing dynamics are in play when it comes to health care. Patients typically view the provider as an unquestioned authority in his or her own office, but your patients still have their own opinions about the care they’ve received. While they’re unlikely to challenge their care experience in a direct confrontation, they can still form negative opinions about it. When patients feel their care has been lacking but don’t feel comfortable saying so, you’re more likely to miss out on the type of post-treatment feedback that’s crucial to providing healthy and satisfactory outcomes, even when that feedback is anonymous.
A feedback survey is an especially powerful tool when it includes solicitations for comments about your practice as a business, not just as a health-care setting. Your patients automatically assess issues like facility cleanliness, ease of payment and even parking. They compare your facility to other local businesses in other industries. If your practice is far below the local standard, then you’re likely to send patients looking for alternatives in another neighborhood or city.
Implementing Feedback Surveys from Patients
Many dentists worry that feedback surveys are expensive, but the truth is that you can easily calibrate them to fit your practice’s needs. Even a simple post-care check list slipped anonymously into a comment box can provide value. In the modern digital age, it’s especially easy to hire a low-cost third party, like SurveyMonkey, that can email quick and painless surveys to your patients directly, handling all the tabulation of results and feedback for you.
When deciding how to implement a feedback survey, remember the three primary objectives are to assess the quality of your care, your accessibility, and the customer’s experience, which should feel friendly and courteous to patients.
Bethany Petty, owner of Dallas Dental Consulting and member of the Coalition of Dental Advisors in Dallas, had this to say about the value of surveys:
“I absolutely love patient surveys. Most of the appointment-confirmation companies out there, highly used by most dentists, have the surveys as an option to send electronically after appointments. They are fairly easy to access and implement.
My tips would be:
- If you use an online appointment-confirmation service that allows for reviews, ask them if these reviews go directly online, and if so, then you may want to be selective with who gets a review.
- If the reviews stay in-house, then once a team member reviews or processes it, take the extra step of calling and thanking that patient. You may also want to ask the patient to post the review online to such sites as Yelp and Angie’s List.
- Actually pay attention to the surveys. Designate someone to review every survey and report in detail to the team.”
With a survey tailored to your practice, you can begin to count on patient feedback as a reliable tool for improving your operations across the board.
Contact the dental advisory team at Goldin Peiser & Peiser for further information on ways to help your dental practice grow and thrive in this competitive market.
Note: This content is accurate as of the date published above and is subject to change. Please seek professional advice before acting on any matter contained in this article.
The post The Value of Conducting Dental Patient Surveys appeared first on .