Improving the Secret Sauce: An initiative to improve patient satisfaction scores by positive messaging

<h3>Context:</h3> Patient satisfaction is often seen as a key indicator of patient-centered care. Organizations want to ensure that patients feel valued, respected, and supported throughout their healthcare journey. Positive satisfaction scores can have a major impact on an organization’s reputation, reflect quality of care and by monitoring allows organizations to identify areas for improvement. <h3>Objective:</h3> The objective of the quality improvement project is to use templated communications when relaying information and results post-visit to help to enhance communication and the overall experience with the goal to improve post-visit satisfaction scores. <h3>Study Design and Analysis:</h3> An intervention was completed by promoting “positive messaging” that clinicians and nursing staff could employ with routine messaging including portal messaging, voice messaging, and with relaying test results. Nine smart phrases were developed to use by nursing staff to incorporate with messaging results post-visit. The phrases each encompassed sympathetic and warm messaging. The phrases were used by clinical nursing staff over a 90 -day period. Satisfaction scores pre-intervention is to be compared to post-intervention results. <h3>Setting and Population:</h3> The study took place in an ambulatory family medicine office analyzing satisfaction scores from a family medicine ambulatory clinic. <h3>Results:</h3> Researchers specifically reviewed five domains of the satisfaction areas pertaining to the clinic’s overall satisfaction as surveyed including: friendliness/courtesy scores of the nurse, nursing promptness for returning calls, listening of the nurse, and care provider instructions for follow-up care, and likelihood to recommend. <h3>Outcomes measured:</h3> Comparatively, benchmarks established were above the 90% from the quarter pre-intervention with post-intervention showing a modest rise of 1% on the domain of friendliness, with others remaining the same or revealing the same or decrease of an average of .5%. <h3>Conclusion:</h3> Satisfaction scores are key component of evaluating patients’ perceptions of their health care experience. It is important to work collaboratively with care clinicians and nursing staff to help with patient collaborative centered care to enhance the experience. Using such positive terminology may help to enhance the experience but clearly it takes more to continue to improve the secret sauce of improving satisfaction scores.