Patients at Mount Sinai Medical Center's Derald H. Ruttenberg Treatment Center are rating their care within hours, if not minutes, of their visit, thanks to a new smartphone-based survey tool.
That type of feedback, hospital officials say, certainly beats mailed surveys, which would be returned weeks or months later – if at all.
The tool, RateMyHospital, was launched on July 15 by the New York City-based center, and the response has been "outstanding," according to Randall F. Holcombe, MD, the center's medical director. Patients who agree to the survey when they register at the center and provide a cellphone number are sent a text message upon discharge asking them to fill out a survey on their smartphone. The survey consists of 12 questions, which respondents can answer with one through five stars, and cover such issues as one's ability to schedule an appointment, office wait times, physician or office staff availability by phone, and cleanliness of the facility.
Holcombe said the survey results are crucial in allowing hospital officials to see what's working – and what isn't – at the cancer treatment center. And by getting them back within a day or two, hospital officials can react quickly to correct problems or make sure good practices are supported.
"It's really simple for patients, and people tend to not mind filling out a survey on their smartphones," he said. The timeliness of the responses, he added, is "critically important."
"With paper surveys, we'd be sending them out and waiting (weeks or months) to get them back," he said. "People take their time completing them and mailing them back, or they just decide not to do it and throw them away, which leads to a relatively low response rate."
Text messaging has proven effective in population health management programs, offering smoking cessation tips and pregnancy information for expectant mothers, as well as chronic disease management programs. Healthcare providers are just now exploring the value of text messaging in patient engagement, which plays a prominent role in Stage 2 of the federal government's meaningful use guidelines for ACA benefits. In fact, a hospital that fails to address patient satisfaction not only risks losing patients, but could also lose federal reimbursement funding for its Medicare and Medicaid business.
Holcombe said Mount Sinai staff "investigated very carefully" how to present the surveys so that they don't create compliance issues with HIPAA. He also noted that the surveys can be modified so that different questions are asked, and officials have the ability to follow up with patients on any lingering issues raised by the survey results.
RateMyHospital was developed by Quality reviews, a software company that designs mHealth tools to help healthcare providers capture real-time patient feedback. "We have always valued, solicited and welcomed patient feedback," said Edward Shin, MD, the company's CEO and creator of the app, in a press release. "This tool allows patients to give real-time feedback, which makes sense in the current digital age."
Mount Sinai officials say they plan on rolling out RateMyHospital to all clinical areas, though Holcombe points out they won't do away entirely with paper surveys.
"The tool doesn't provide the type of information that you need to benchmark" against other institutions or the hospital's own historical information, he pointed out. In other words, while the one-to-five-star rating is important, hospital officials want patients to be able to fill out a more extensive questionnaire when needed.
"Right now, it's important that we offer both" types of surveys, Holcombe said.
