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MailFebruary 2020--How can you measure patient experience? The Patient Experience Manager of Dental Associates, Christina Villarreal, explains how they do it with the intention of continuously improving the experience they provide their dental patients.
Determining ways to measure patient satisfaction, constantly monitoring that satisfaction, and intentionally striving to make improvements is one of the key ways in which Dental Associates has distinguished itself from other dental service organizations (DSOs). In fact, Dental Associates has a dedicated executive, the Patient Experience Manage, to focus on the patient experience
The Tools We Use to Monitor Dental Patient Experience
Dental Associates uses three principal tools to measure and monitor patient satisfaction.
Patient Surveys
We use a third-party service to randomly survey new and existing patients to learn about different parts of the patient experience. The scores and comments are examined to find trends and identify opportunities for improvement in their clinics and each one of their doctor teams.
Patient Prism
We also use the Patient Prism platform to monitor our new patient phone calls, which is extremely important. We want to be sure that when new patients call us, we are building connections, taking care of those patients, and booking appointments. We monitor our staff on the calls and use all the data that we get from the Patient Prism dashboards to see how we are doing.
Social Media
Any time comments pop up on our social media, Dental Associates is notified. We have a great team that will respond to those posts and get in touch with those patients to make sure that if any service recovery is needed, we do it swiftly. And we also thank those patients that provide positive reviews.
Dental Associates looks for themes among the social media comments and for aspects of patient experience that need improvement. We find opportunities where we can improve our patient's experience, whether it is that first phone call or when they walk in the door, or each interaction that they have with us.
The Parts of the Dental Patient Experience We Measure
Dental Associates measures different aspects and phases of the patient experience. We are tracking patient feedback on each part of a patient’s dental visit experience. This way we know which parts of the experience need improvement and which of these improvements to set as the top priority.
- Pre-visit phone call conversation
- New patient information delivery and forms
- Doctor-patient interaction
- Hygienist-patient interaction
- Dental assistant-patient interaction
- Front desk-patient interaction
- The facility
- Wait times
- Payment issues
- Treatment follow up
- Recall scheduling
- Treatment scheduling
- Appointment confirmation process
- “Other” aspects of the experience such as privacy and safety concerns
On surveys, there are multiple questions that we ask to find out what patients feel about different parts of their journey with us at their visit. Then with social media, we keep track of how many reviews we get. We also have a platform that we use to monitor how many times specific parts of the experience are negative. For example, we monitor wait times. We want to see where the negative and positive trends lie.
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