Why are hospital surveys so important?

The quality of services  – as opposed to most products – is not immediately perceptible. That’s why surveys of customers and other contact groups is so important, to get an idea of the quality provided.
Information regarding the quality of services rendered or rather, determining a current status, are the general prerequisites for every process of improvement. Statements about quality serve as the foundation of management decisions and - as long as surveys are repeated at appropriate intervals – assist in gauging the effectiveness of intervention.
Apart form this, surveys develop transparency within the organization and offer all levels, in particular those of management, background information on the perception of different contact groups.

Being able to document quality with numbers – this not only benefits the organization internally, but also outwardly, be it in competition with other institutes or in the framework of marketing.
Whilst competing for budgets, hospitals can distinguish themselves from their contenders with the help of expressive quality reports. It is for this reason that surveys, in particular those of patients and referrers, containing substantial data regarding quality, are necessary (Quality Report).
Surveys, and the resulting information regarding the quality of the institute are valuable to marketing in more ways than one. On the one side, satisfaction surveys, in particular those of patients, enable one to assess whether or not the hospitals aspirations in patient orientation are perceived by the patients as satisfactory, At the same time, surveys constitute part of patient orientation. And on the other side, quality reports of the relevant survey results, which are also used as marketing instruments, document the successful patient orientation of an institute.

In order to reach all of these targets it isn’t enough, as is often the case, to simply conduct sporadic surveys. It is in fact necessary to conduct surveys at regular intervals (i.e. several times a year), so as to trace a continuing development.
To assess the effectiveness of intervention from the viewpoint of the parties involved, targeted surveys should be conducted before and after any quality improvement measures are implemented.
The surveying of different contact groups (surveys of patients, next of kin, referrers, employee, ad-hoc surveys on demand), and the different departments of an organization help to complete the picture

Up until now such a regular application of surveys usually fails for practical or financial reasons: an organization wishing to conduct wide scale and regular surveys, will usually be missing the personnel and technical support required to absorb the labour expenditure in designing surveys, printing questionnaires and collating of the data collected.
Outsourcing regular surveys to external service providers is not cost effective. Apart from this, the evaluation process for ad-hoc surveys often takes too long.

EvaSys qm|Clinica offers the solution here: whether through the convenient questionnaire designer, the automated data capturing and right up to complete evaluation, this software solution offers you maximum automation. So hospitals can conduct surveys themselves, with a minimum of time and personnel expenditure.

As EvaSys qm|Clinica is operated as an intranet-based solution from any PC in the organization, all organization structures imaginable (locations, buildings, wards, service units) can be easily represented by defining rights and roles. Users need only their Web browser to use the software, so reducing strain on the IT department.

next: Measuring satisfaction