If your company is in the business of providing Emergency Medical Services (EMS), your job is to treat and transport people who are in the midst of potentially life-threatening health crises, but do you know where your company’s strengths and weaknesses lie, or are you just guessing?
Feedback Innovations removes the guesswork by measuring patient satisfaction and identifying both where you’re exceling and where you could improve so you can set and achieve goals for your EMS agency.
WHAT FEEDBACK INNOVATIONS DOES
Feedback Innovations collects and measures metrics derived from patient satisfaction surveys. This firsthand knowledge is a powerful, accurate, and efficient system for determining how satisfied patients are with your service.
A Feedback Innovations patient satisfaction survey goes way beyond asking whether a patient was happy with your service. Instead, it collects facts, real data that can be analyzed and used to improve staff performance and patient care.
“The survey focuses specifically on the service provided,” Feedback Innovations co-founder Michael Flanagan said.
“Questions asked include how helpful the dispatcher was, whether the ambulance crew kept the patient informed throughout the service, and whether EMTs controlled the patient’s pain,” Flanagan said.
This information is combined with information received from the client, such as the patient’s age and gender, location of incident, date, time of day, names of the responders, and which vehicles they used. All of this data results in business intelligence that presents a complete picture of the incident and the service provided.
The value of the Feedback Innovations system lies in the reports offered. With the data gathered, you can do the following:
- Use industry benchmarks to identify how your agency compares to your competitors’ agencies and determine the necessary steps to beat the status quo and exceed expectations.
- Ensure your agency meets the Commission on Accreditation of Ambulance Services (CAAS) and the IHI Triple Aim requirements.
- Determine the level at which individual employees are performing, rewarding those who excel and providing additional education and support for those who are falling behind.
For example, a report may reveal an individual EMT performs extremely well on some tasks and not on others. Time and day of poor performance also can be provided. This can help decision-makers determine areas of improvement or even shift schedule changes for peak performance.
Information also can be tied to vehicles. The reporting tools can provide data on incidents in which crews are slow to respond, and may determine it is always when a specific ambulance is used.
“This could signify there is an issue with the vehicle,” Flanagan said.
HOW FEEDBACK INNOVATIONS WORKS
Using Feedback Innovations is easy because the system is automated and provides user-friendly data reporting tools for analysis.
Following HIPAA laws and keeping patient privacy at top of mind, Feedback Innovations collects patients’ mailing information and sends the surveys with return postage provided. When surveys are returned, Feedback Innovations performs the data entry, analyzes the collected data, and generates a series of standard monthly reports. Patients also can take it online.
These reports show how patients rated your services over specified periods of time or how your services rank compared to your competitors. They also can be sorted to filter data in various ways, including by demographic, location, time frame, topic, or individual staff member, Flanagan said.
“Although some clients are initially reluctant to embrace the patient satisfaction survey because they fear unpleasant news, clients typically report that they find the comments are more positive than they would have guessed,” he said. “Using the provided information, you can congratulate your staff on areas of performance where they excel and also determine where to focus improvement efforts.”
GET THE FACTS
Companies used to have to guess what they needed to improve service and then spend time and money, perhaps unnecessarily, on those areas.
The software’s reporting tools let agencies “know exactly where to focus their efforts,” Flanagan said.
Feedback Innovations’ patient satisfaction surveys are essential tools to measure the performance of an agency—whether that is to determine an employee’s performance or to improve interactions with patients—and grow the agency’s service levels to ensure they are top-notch.