5 Considerations for Annual Patient Follow-Up Surveys
Patient follow-up surveys can provide crucial insights into long-term outcomes, treatment tracking, and patient health. Read more.
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Patient follow-up surveys can provide crucial insights into long-term outcomes, treatment tracking, and patient health. Read more.
Patient follow-up forms and surveys contain critical data for long-term outcomes, tracking treatments, staying engaged with patients, and uncovering new insights. But finding the right ways to gather and organize that data isn’t straightforward.
The healthcare industry is synonymous with mass data and processes, and finding the right way to easily gather—and organize—the data you need is key. Huge amounts of forms and surveys are still sent out by physical mail or word documents, making it harder to organize and filter the data received.
Seemingly simple forms can cause a lot of legwork and administration if the data—and form process—is being organized manually.
If you’re tracking long-term outcomes and gathering annual follow-up information following diagnoses with patients, automating the survey process can be a huge help. For example, you might automate annual check-ins and health metric gathering for patients following an oncology diagnosis.
Automating patient surveys saves time, costs, and headache, but there are things to consider to make sure you’re using the right method for your unique needs. We’ve identified five major considerations and outcomes for ensuring efficiency with your follow-up surveys:
Almost all patient forms—including patient follow-up forms and annual check-ins—ask patients to update their information on file. They are usually prompted to fill in these data fields if anything has changed. For example:
This seemingly simple process opens up a ton of opportunities for mistakes.
Automating the survey process makes it easier for patients to update their information accurately. This keeps your patient data clean and accurate.
For example, at Checkbox, we have a solution called the Profile Property Updater. This allows you to automatically update patients’ custom profile properties with survey answers, so updating their information accurately and easily.
If you’re sending a survey to gather patient data, it pays to make sure that you’re gaining the right insights. Formatting your survey and asking the right questions is crucial.
For example, look at the following survey questions:
These questions could be adjusted slightly to gain a very high level of accuracy. Here’s how we would recommend adjusting the survey and questions:
By choosing the correct digital question type, you can already see the number of mistakes that would be avoided. Plus, these questions give more opportunities for deeper insights and granular data gathering.
This in turn helps you provide more specialized patient care, and improves your insights into your patients.
The quality of your survey questions determines the quality of your reporting. Consider the objective of the survey, the type of data that would be most insightful, and which type of questions will return the desired data structure for long-term learning.
Being able to understand trends over time (and based on things you know about patients) is important for diving deeper into the data.
We’ve noticed that a unique challenge for this type of survey is that the free-form nature of a lot of the data usually makes analysis impossible at worst, or very hard at best. Much of what you are trying to do is turn unstructured data into structured insights that help doctors and nurses make better decisions.
Creating a solid process for data organization is important.
A couple of things that can help are:
Ultimately, if your patient data is gathered and organized digitally, you can dig into it in different ways to easily pull insights and analyze trends over time. This gives you deeper levels of insight, but it also saves you vital time and energy sifting through the data.
Once you are able to automate data collection and have found the right method for organizing the insights, it’s critical to consider exactly how you will get these insights into the decision paths of the right people in your organization.
This is typically where most companies advise on expensive system integrators or confusing data structures. At Checkbox, we make it easy for healthcare companies to share insights across teams. You don’t need heavy technical knowledge to have records flow into your existing patient record system. You don’t need to code anything to get alerts set up with email automations.
It shouldn’t be difficult to share your patient data and insights with the right people.
If you’re ready to look at automating the process for collecting and organizing annual patient follow-up surveys, you also want to make sure you’re using the right tool for your specific needs.
Some factors to consider when looking around are:
At Checkbox, we make patient feedback and surveys simple.
We’ve been working with healthcare companies for over 15 years. We support some of the world’s largest organizations in automating critical data capture from patients and doctors across their different patient touchpoints.
We’ve taken their feedback and created a survey platform that’s simple and works for the specialized needs of patient follow-up processes.
How does this help you?
If you’re creating surveys for annual patient follow-ups, it pays to automate the process and make sure you’re gathering the best insights from the data.
The good news is that there are tools that can help. And it doesn’t have to be challenging to get set up. There are ways to automatically gather patient information and then gain the insights you need from the data without coding experience—and without sinking a huge amount of time and effort into doing so.
Sign up for a free trial to see Checkbox in action for annual patient follow-up surveys.
Checkbox develops affordable, feature-rich survey software for organizations, teams, and individuals