The Crossroads Group: Seeing Into the Patient Experience

Introduction

The Crossroads Group, Inc., a patient survey company, partnered with Stat to share industry insights on patient experience and provide benchmarking data. We've highlighted key sections of the webinar that showcase how health centers can improve patient experience and provide data-driven insights into patient perceptions.

Watch the full webinar on YouTube

Quality of Care: The Leading Variable in Patient Reported Satisfaction

Watch the video clip on YouTube

Mark Robledo, The Crossroads Group President: We look also at the correlation between some of the questions we ask and the overall rating. And what we find is that quality of care is almost always the strongest correlation. We see that with almost every client. Quality of care is the key driver. It’s the reason why patients go for health care. Even the friendliest staff can't compensate for poor quality care—without it, a visit may feel like a wasted opportunity.

What Stat does is ultimately have a huge impact on the quality of care because of that coordination aspect. Everyone knows where everyone is. They can maximize the value added to that patient during the visit in the shortest amount of time possible. That has a direct impact on that quality-of-care perception. Other key drivers are:

• Provider explanation of care
• Provider listening
• Knowledge of health history
• Time spent by the provider (not only of the minutes spent but the quality of those minutes)

All of those are key drivers of patient experience. That is backed up by hundreds of thousands of surveys that we have in our database.  

Alan Bucknum, Stat CEO: When we think about quality, we think of quality scores and measures that we use to track that. When patients answer a survey question about quality of care, they may interpret it differently than healthcare professionals do. So, what are some ways you see health centers are improving the quality of care that patients are reporting?

Mark: Sometimes staff and patients define quality in different ways. Sometimes nurses define quality as the quality of a blood draw in terms of the phlebotomy, or the quality of a diagnosis, or the quality of the medical care. That is part of the quality of care from the patient's perspective, but quality is defined more broadly by patients. Patients are not always able to identify quality from a clinical standpoint. But they can always determine if someone was friendly, communicated and explained care.

Key Data From Stat’s Clinical Benchmarking Report

Quality of Interaction Shapes Patient Perception of Time Spent With Provider

‍Alan: There are specific measures related to time with the provider. We’ve seen some interesting perceptions there. Some providers do not spend more time with patients, but they make that patient feel loved and cared about. The provider remembers things from your past conversations. And the providers cheat on that, you know they put notes in their EHR like, “Mark’s daughter just graduated high school. Remember to ask how she’s doing.” Those things help patients perceive that the provider's time is valuable and sufficient. We have relatively few providers whose patients key in on the provider spending less time with them, if the provider does a great job communicating, understanding and having great bedside manner.  

‍Perceptions of Patient Arrival Times  

Alan: One of the benchmarks we look at is what percent of patients checked in within 4 minutes of their appointment time. What we hear often is this anecdote in healthcare that, “Most of our patients are late, therefore we really struggle to run on time.” What we see on average is, yes absolutely there are patients who are late. The lowest performing health center on this mark has around 50% of their patients running late for their appointments. Not coincidentally, that is a health center where their wait times tend to be longer. So, a patient at this health center has a patient at 3 o’clock, and that patient knows that doesn’t really mean they have a 3 o’clock appointment.  

You see here that at our median health center, 3 out of 4 patients are checking in within 5 minutes of their appointment time. Contrary to common belief, health center delays are often driven more by systemic factors than by patient behavior.

Takeaways

1. Quality of care is the leading variable in patient satisfaction. 
2. The quality of the interaction between a patient and provider can shape the patient's perception of how much time their provider spent with them. 
3. Most patients are arriving within 5 minutes of their appointment time. 

Connect with Stat to receive a free copy of the Clinical Benchmarking Report. 

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