Patient feedback through SMS
One of our brands is an Urgent Care facility and we are in the process of setting up patient feedback through SMS. If anyone else is doing this; I would be interested in knowing if you have limits on how often the patient receives a survey and what that time span is (1 every two weeks, once a month, etc.). Also, if there are any lessons learned from your experience in surveying in this way.
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I'm not familiar with delivering surveys through SMS, but I would be extremely cautious in requesting feedback too often from patients. If it is requested after a particular care episode, I think that may be reasonable. But please see my earlier comment regarding clinical practitioners receiving surveys too often and complaining about it -- I think similar principles apply in that healthcare episodes can be extremely nerve-wracking and it can come off as insensitive or, at worst, distracting from patient or in this instance self-care to ask feedback questions.
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@AdamK12 I agree with you. We certainly are only planning to send it after a visit and really don't want to send another survey if they have a follow-up visit within a couple of weeks. The survey is very short and even has an option to end after the first satisfaction question.
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@Tonya_Fulton That's good to know--a quick survey is always a plus. How do you determine whether the patient has a followup visit soon after?
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We are using a JavaScript that will capture the date the survey was last completed (created an embedded data field to store in their profile). The ED field is pulled in and verifies if the data is over the span of time we assign between surveys. We actually use this in a lot of internal feedback surveys when they are anonymous.
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I've run across a couple of healthcare providers using SMS. Happy to connect you, if still relevant and helpful.
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Hi! Curious to see what you settled on! Our organization has an "every 30 days" rule (so if you see your PCP and get surveyed on that encounter, then two weeks later you go to an urgent care...you wouldn't get that urgent care experience survey). We have been doing this about 18 months now, and have had very minimal complaints about getting surveys "too often".
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@JessicaGregory_CHNw We settled on 14 days for the time span. We have been running the feedback since late July and have not received any complaints. Our survey asks if they would be willing to answer a few more questions after the initial two questions and surprisingly 87% of those who begin will answer the full survey. Although our distribution to response rate is only 10%. SMS does provide 99% of the responses; so that was a big win for us.
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