Patient Signals

Patient Signals (service mark pending) is a self-service patient satisfaction and experience measurement tool for on-site use by healthcare providers of all types (GPs, specialists, dentists, chiropractors, optometrists, physical therapists, psychologists, counselors, and so on). Unlike nearly all currently available patient satisfaction survey products, which rely upon survey invitations and links emailed to patients at their home addresses, the Patient Signals approach delivers completely ANONYMOUS, on-site measurement. This means health care providers receive candid, trustworthy feedback from patients who are NOT concerned about privacy or confidentiality issues, and those patients are giving feedback while their experience at the customer’s clinic or office is completely fresh and easy to recall.

The Patient Signals tool is bilingual, supporting both English and Spanish at this time (selectable by the patient on the tablet app). Other languages may be added as customer demand dictates.

Our research with patients shows many (especially older patients and those on Medicare) are reluctant to share honest, constructively critical feedback with their healthcare providers if they can be identified. Anonymous measurement is essential if the HCP’s goal is to gather candid, trustworthy patient feedback. Also, there’s increasing concern among the public in sharing email addresses with businesses or service providers, for fear that addresses may be hacked and targeted for malicious activities. On-site, tablet-based patient feedback is easy, effective and risk-free for patients.

HCP customers build their own survey questionnaires, selecting items from a “master collection” of questions developed by Ph.D.-level survey research experts on staff at Ansanon Research. With “drag-and-drop” ease, the customer builds the HCP office’s questionnaire, which patients then answer using this Android tablet app (given to patients to use either in the exam/treatment room after the visit or available at the check-out desk in a tablet kiosk mount). Customers may change the questions contained in their clinic/office survey at any time, allowing flexible and timely measurement of a broad range of patient concerns and experiences.

Customers also may create a separate, introductory screen of questions designed specifically for new patients, which focus on marketing questions (how they heard about the clinic, what prompted them to visit, whether they have seen advertisements or other clinic publicity, etc.). Using a lead-off screening question (“Are you a new or existing patient?”), the proper screens are served up to the patient user.

Customers purchase a subscription to the Patient Signals reporting service, into which the tablet app feeds all patient survey responses. After completing a one-time set-up, during which customers enter the names, position titles and thumbnail photos of the people in their clinic/office for whom patients will provide feedback, the only ongoing management tasks involve keeping the staff entries current in the database and updating survey questions (if desired). For clinics/offices with more than one primary HCP (such as a dentist’s office with three dentists), customers may upgrade their subscription to obtain separate results break-outs by HCP, rather than just a single clinic-wide set of results.

Including face shots of the HCPs and supporting staff on the tablet questionnaire allows higher-resolution measurement of staff performance, in patients’ eyes. If a clinic has three wonderful medical assistants and one who’s not so good, supporting patient evaluations by name (and including photos to improve reliability of staff recall by patients) is essential to teasing out disparate performance within a particular position category within the clinic.