In 2019, 32.3% of women and 26% of men in the United States visited a retail health clinic or urgent care center at least once within the past 12 months. Such figures suggest a significant demand for urgent care services.
If you’re a healthcare provider, what measures should you consider when evaluating a patient’s experience with urgent care? How do you measure the patient’s experience of care?
Why is measuring a patient’s experience with urgent care important? What can you do to help improve the patient experience?
This article discusses the various patient experience measures to help evaluate urgent care and shows how to measure such experiences.
This article also explains why assessing patient care is vital for the success of urgent care and gives tips to help improve the patient experience.
Urgent care facilities utilize medical imaging techniques to quickly assess patients with symptoms like chest pains, which could potentially be indicative of underlying lung issues. Through advanced imaging modalities like X-rays, CT scans, and MRI, radiologists can promptly evaluate the lungs and surrounding structures, aiding in the identification of potential abnormalities or diseases like mesothelioma.
This enables healthcare professionals to make timely and informed decisions regarding patient management and treatment, ultimately contributing to improved outcomes for individuals seeking urgent care.
By measuring patient experience, healthcare providers can determine the effectiveness of their urgent care procedures.
Read on to learn how patient experience measures can help improve urgent care.
Importance of Measuring Patient Experience in Urgent Care
One of the significant consumer value propositions of urgent care is convenience. For healthcare providers to improve urgent care, they must evaluate factors like service quality and speed, including how quickly the facility or clinic moves through its patients while providing quality healthcare services.
By measuring patient experience, providers can estimate more accurately and objectively what areas of urgent care they need to improve or address. These areas can include wait times, patients accommodated per hour, communication, and customer satisfaction.
Measurement of person-centered care is also essential in ensuring action, accountability, and improvement of care quality.
With measures, healthcare providers may find it easier to determine customers’ needs and whether the provider is delivering quality services consistently.
How Do You Measure the Patient Experience of Urgent Care?
Healthcare providers should consider the following measures to evaluate patient experience:
- The number of patients seen within a specific period: One of the things that may come to mind when you hear “urgent” in urgent care is speed.
Healthcare providers must ensure that patients visiting urgent care facilities are attended to quickly.
You can determine how many patients the facility handles within a specific period by counting the number of patients a clinic accommodates per hour.
Health practitioners who want to increase the number of patients accommodated in an hour or day can use this measure as a reference.
- Average patient wait times: The time that a patient spends waiting for the doctor to arrive and attend to them is the wait time. Clinicians can measure such times using timestamps or notations and analyze the results through reports.
Consider evaluating this measure if you want to increase your facility’s productivity by reducing patient wait times.
- Effectivity of communication: Effective communication involves delivering the correct message between the patient and doctor. It aims to minimize or prevent the chance of getting the wrong information.
You can assess how much patients understand when the clinic or hospital staff explains the side effects of any new medication. Doing so can help the staff improve their communication skills so that customers become more likely to understand.
Likewise, you can encourage customers and patients to ask questions whenever there is vague information to ensure understanding.
- Customer satisfaction: One popular measure of customer satisfaction is by patient surveys.
Questions to ask in your survey can include your customers’ experience during their recent visit or whether they’ll recommend your facility to other customers.
How to Improve Patient Experience Measures for Urgent Care
Improving patient experience involves addressing urgent care areas that fall short of the expected outcomes. With accurate measurement, it may be easier for you to determine what these underperforming areas are and how much work needs to be done.
For example, if you don’t know how many patients your facility accommodates per hour, you may not know whether you have too few customers. If you’re not measuring wait times, you may not know how long customers wait on average to receive urgent care.
Provide a clear purpose for why you’re doing the measurements and interpret the results correctly to ensure your measurements represent an accurate and reliable assessment of urgent care quality.
Doing so helps you identify real problems in your facility so you can investigate and address them directly.
After addressing these problems, you can conduct a follow-up measurement later to see if anything has improved. If there’s favorable change, then your patient experience measures are likely a success.
If your measurements show that you have long wait times, you can investigate the factors causing these delays. Afterward, you can develop solutions to shorten these times and measure again after a few weeks or months to see any progress.
If you’re running a clinic or healthcare facility, coordinate with your physicians and other concerned staff, including your IT (information technology) department, to develop ways to measure patient experiences for urgent care.
