How to Measure Patient Experience and Satisfaction with Telehealth

Why should you use patient experience and satisfaction surveys for telehealth visits?

It’ll inform quality improvement efforts at your health center, benefitting both patients and providers in several ways:

• Positive patient experiences increase engagement in and adherence to care. Research shows that patients who have positive experiences are more likely to engage in prevention and disease management processes of care, adhere to medical advice and treatment plans, and experience better health outcomes.
• Positive patient experiences are associated with organizational benefits. For organizations, positive experiences are associated with lower medical malpractice risk and greater employee satisfaction.
• Ongoing assessment of patient experience and satisfaction can inform quality improvement and contribute to program sustainability. Measuring patient experience can reveal important problems like gaps in provider-patient communications that can have broad implications for clinical quality and safety. Implementing a process of measurement and quality improvement can increase the likelihood that telehealth programs will contribute to patient-centered care and be sustained.

RAND is currently doing an evaluation of our telehealth program, Sustainable Models of Telehealth in the Safety Net. And as part of that work, it has created a new toolkit to provide guidance for clinics looking to design and field surveys. The toolkit, Measuring Patient Experience sand Satisfaction with Telemedicine: A Quick Guide to Survey Selection, includes:

1. The types of questions typically included in surveys on telehealth.
2. A survey developed by survey experts at RAND, which you may adapt to meet the needs of your health center.
3. RAND edits to actual surveys in use in clinics, so you can see how to improve clarity and interpretation of the results.

DOWNLOAD

Please tell us how you are using this toolkit! Email [email protected]