Patient Satisfaction Tool Adopted by 8 Hospital Emergency Rooms in New York Area

NEW YORK - Dec. 12, 2014 - PRLog -- RateMyHospital®, the groundbreaking real-time  survey tool launched earlier this year by Quality Reviews, Inc., has been adopted by six of the most active hospital emergency rooms in New York City to help improve the quality of services offered to patients and EMS crews in the region.  All six of these hospitals are part of the Mount Sinai Health System:  Mount Sinai Hospital, Mount Sinai St. Luke’s, Mount Sinai Roosevelt, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, Mount Sinai Beth Israel Brooklyn, and Mount Sinai Queens Hospitals.

Emergency departments (EDs) serve as the “front door” of urban hospitals for patients of every demographic.  The care patients receive in an ED gives them a first and often lasting impression of the hospital. To stay competitive, hospital emergency rooms need to be able to react quickly to solve issues affecting their clients, namely, acutely ill patients and the EMS crews responsible for bringing them in. RateMyHospital helps accelerate ED efficiency through the real-time patient and EMS crew feedback it provides.

In total, eight New York and New Jersey hospital emergency rooms are using RateMyHospital, while the company works to finalize many other deals nationally.  Newark Beth Israel Medical Center has been using this patient survey tool for nearly six months. Jamaica Hospital Medical Center recently launched the product.  Feedback is collected through a web-based survey tool that patients access via smartphone.  This process allows healthcare providers to record, collect and act on patient satisfaction issues within a matter of hours.

Rapid Response to Feedback Data Helps Emergency Rooms

“RateMyHospital generates real-time data that enables a rapid response that fits with the dynamic of an Emergency Department.  The clinical and administrative staffs of EDs are used to acting rapidly to save people’s lives,” says Edward Shin, M.D., CEO of Quality Reviews. “Now they can apply the same speed to dealing with issues of customer service or environmental complaints that are reported via RateMyHospital, issues that affect patient satisfaction.”

Patients are providing feedback on Emergency Department performance within an average of one hour of their visit. Now service improvements can be made within minutes to hours of receiving that feedback—a dramatic improvement over the median response time of 1-2 months for paper-based surveys, says Dr. Shin.

“We can start each day reviewing critical performance information from the day before and then immediately address problem areas,” reports Carl Ramsay, M.D.,Vice President, Emergency Medicine Clinical Operations for all of the Mount Sinai Health System hospitals.  Dr. Ramsay noted that his ED staff members have learned to appreciate the accuracy of patients and their families in helping to identify problems.

He describes the EMS crews who transport patients into emergency rooms as critical extensions of the hospitals’ staffs.  “The more we can reduce the time it takes them to input patients and discharge their responsibilities, the more we are helping the EMS workers to achieve their performance standards,” Dr. Ramsay said.

RateMyHospital – How It Works; Access Via Smartphone

Traditionally, patient-satisfaction scores are based on paper surveys sent to patients after they have left a health care facility.  Results depend on timely mail or email delivery, among other factors. With RateMyHospital,a text message is sent to patients within one hour of their visit, requesting them to fill out a HIPAA-secure survey on their smartphone.   Patients answer anywhere from eight to 12 questions with a 5-star rating system. (It is also possible to customize questions and allow free-text comments.)

As soon as a response is received, typically within 24 hours, the data is updated in real-time to a health care providers’ web-based administrative dashboard where the patient experience can be visualized within a few clicks.  There, hospital leadership can evaluate the analytics and implement changes that will affect patient satisfaction within hours, instead of the weeks or months typical of patient-based survey turnaround times.

Patient satisfaction is a key metric in the current transformation in healthcare taking place in this country.  Under the Affordable Care Act, acute-care hospitals are eligible to receive incentive payments for the measurable quality of care they provide to Medicare patients.

Results-to-date for RateMyHospital are compelling. After a year of use in a single outpatient cancer center, over 5,000 patients have voiced their feedback using RateMyHospital.  This approximately 15 percent response rate is a dramatic comparison to the percentages seen when using onlytraditional paper surveys.   In addition, ¾ of people who respond do so in the first 24 hours after their office visit, with a median response time of 1.5 hours.  Finally, the majority of individuals who respond are Medicare-aged patients.    Hospital administrators said the perspectives led to important operational improvements.

Quality Reviews, Inc.

Quality Reviews is a healthcare software firm established in 2012 by three New York City-based innovation executives, including CEO and co-founder Edward  Shin, MD, who developed RateMyHospital,  and has over 12 years’ experience building healthcare IT businesses.