Texas Tech Physicians recently partnered with NarrativeDx, a company that retrieves patient comments from social media and Press Ganey, and puts them into a dashboard for easy viewing. Each clinic has a section in the dashboard where users can view positive and negative comments, as well as trending sentiment, areas of opportunity and negative and positive themes.
“NarrativeDx eliminates the research time it takes to identify trends based on patient comments” said Chief Experience Officer Dennis Lamb. “This enables much quicker action, whether it be recognition or redirection, than we have had in the past. Additionally, a comment is much more meaningful and helpful to us than only a shaded dot on a survey.”
Recently, I came across an article in Harvard Business Review that covered the importance of using customer feedback tools and how measuring customer satisfaction can help a company operate more efficiently. When the opinions and suggestions of customers (or in the case of Texas Tech Physicians—patients) are taken into consideration and put into practice, those customers become appreciative of efforts being made to accommodate them. Comments bring numbers to life.
Yet we still use numbers. The current patient satisfaction score of Texas Tech Physicians is 92.6 and we are always striving to increase that number. However, an overall high number can mask problems for individual departments and give a false sense of satisfaction in our performance. By implementing NarrativeDx, our entire organization will be able to pinpoint areas to be improved and also areas that we are doing well.
The article points out what a number of people are doing these days. Among them is asking the key question: “Would you recommend us?” It is called Net Promoter Score, and that is the number we are striving to drive higher (as a total percentage of responses). Of course, Texas Tech Physicians strives to go beyond service and have meaningful relationships with our patients, while welcoming their feedback enthusiastically.
If you are interested in looking at the NarrativeDx data, please ask your department administrator for more information.