Evaluating Strategies to Improve Patient Satisfaction in Hospitals

Abstract

This study sought to identify the best strategies for healthcare executives to utilize to improve patient satisfaction with a hospital. It is important to evaluate these types of strategies because making improvements to one’s service quality could lead to an increase in overall patient satisfaction levels, have a direct relationship with patient behavioral intentions, subsequently play a very critical role in the process of delivering quality patient care and overall healthcare, and could ensure a healthcare organization’s ability to remain financially solvent.
We based our comprehensive evaluation of these strategies on the distillation from numerous studies regarding patient satisfaction in a healthcare setting. Specifically, we analyzed data from various studies. Several of the strategies that we evaluated, when employed, could potentially lead to improved patient satisfaction scores, including: empowered nurses and physicians, patient-centered care, focused staff on improving patient satisfaction scores, mandated education, service vs. quality, choose us, public reporting, and report cards.
It is important to evaluate strategies as a means to improve patient satisfaction and the quality of care patients receive. Key in this evaluation is the idea that patient satisfaction could help increase hospital revenue, could be a proxy for treatment quality, is associated with increased adherence, and is a means for health service research. Based on our findings, and in most cases, the adjusted bigger impacts would be the breadth-based strategies of empowered nurses or patients, and mandating education just before report cards. They would recommend these for those hospitals that are looking to improve their patient satisfaction scores. Additionally, coupled with this, they would recommend that healthcare management utilize customer satisfaction data, patient satisfaction analysis, and other patient feedback tools to mirror overall patient satisfaction before and after changes in the system to evaluate the change. (Silvera et al.2021)