Try These Communication Strategies in Your ED to Increase Your Patient Satisfaction Scores
By Lisa D. Ellis
When patients come to your hospital for services, do you take the time to spotlight your organization’s strengths and let them know how much you value their health and well-being? If not, you could be missing an important opportunity to improve your patient satisfaction ratings and also get them to recommend your facility to their family and friends. Both of these oversights can result in lost opportunity, patient relationships, and revenue.
Why Poor Satisfaction Ratings Come at a High Cost
Since Medicare and many insurers now base reimbursements on how patients rate their stay in exit surveys, poor patient satisfaction ratings can negatively impact your ROI. These ratings are also shared on the CMS website, so prospective patients will see how their peers perceived care they received.
This makes it essential to consider marketing to patients when they come to your facility and letting them know you care about their experience. In addition to print, radio, and TV ads, your social media presence, and special events, your marketing and communications plan should include messages that can be conveyed by your staff members in their interactions with patients and their families.
In fact, the most successful hospitals today view every encounter in their facility as an opportunity to reinforce the message that the patient matters and that the hospital staff takes pride in delivering high-quality care that leads to best outcomes. Here we’ll look at how you can implement or improve these messages at a single hospital or across an entire health system.