In-house report card gives faster feedback
Supervisor takes issue with surveys
Although Children's Hospital of Alabama in Birmingham — like many health care facilities — contracts with a company to do internal customer service surveys, the time lag between patient visits and follow-up phone calls can leave something to be desired in the feedback given to registration staff, says Tara Tinsley, CHAM, inpatient access supervisor.
Her concern, she adds, is not only that her department loses the advantage of having immediate feedback, but that customers' recollections of their visit may be blurred by the time they get the call from the survey company.
"We have the customer service scores we get from this company, but they don't seem to jibe with the daily comments that we get," Tinsley notes. "With the lapse of time, it could be that something [apart from] the registration process went wrong, and by the time they get the call asking them to complete the survey, they give everybody a bad rating.
"I wanted to try to find a way to home in on exactly what our issues and problems are," she adds. With that in mind, Tinsley developed a registration "report card" to be distributed immediately after patient encounters in four areas — inpatient admitting, referred testing, one-day surgery, and preadmission testing.
The report card includes the same questions used in the other survey, but asks customers to give an A, B, C, D, or F in each of the categories, instead of a rating between one and five. There are also open-ended questions regarding changes that respondents would like to see made, and staff members they might like to recognize. (See report card.)
Tinsley's effort is actually a spinoff of an in-house report card used by the hospital's specialty clinics, she explains, but focuses only on the registration encounter while the clinic's tool is used to evaluate the entire visit.
"I have a different reporting mechanism — the access employees in the specialty clinics don't report to me — so this is just to get a snapshot of what is going on in my areas," Tinsley adds.
Although it was too early for results from her report card, the registration grades from the clinics' report cards already support Tinsley's belief that the feedback on the customer service survey is somehow distorted, she says. "We've found that when we get results [from the outside survey] that say we're falling short, [the clinics' report card] says something entirely different.
"This says to me that it's more beneficial to capture this data from patients at the time of the visit," Tinsley adds. "The parents may not even get a [survey] phone call until a week or two after the visit, and in a lot of cases, they've already had the opportunity to come back to the hospital. The first visit could have been fine, and they could be [reporting] something from that second visit."
[Editor's note: Tara Tinsley can be reached at [email protected].]
Although Children's Hospital of Alabama in Birmingham ... contracts with a company to do internal customer service surveys, the time lag between patient visits and follow-up phone calls can leave something to be desired ...You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
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