FierceHealthcare.com- If you’ve got it, flaunt it. That’s the message from fiercehealthcare on patient satisfaction scores. Instead of simply looking at 3rdparty patient satisfaction measurement as a hurdle to cross for reimbursement, many organizations are using these scores as marketing tools. Hospitals in California, Minnesota, and elsewhere are posting HCAHPS data on Facebook, Twitter and their websites. The goal is to attract new patients
with the satisfaction of your current ones.
Our Take: This isn’t so much news as confirmation of a new business reality. Most patients are never going to visit a CMS website to compare quality or patient satisfaction scores across organizations. You can be sure, however, that if your rival organization has better scores, that organization will be posting them on billboards, tv spots, social media outlets and more.
It’s marketing-fueled transparency. And it comes with sharper point. It’s possible for all hospitals in a town to provide excellent care or to concurrently promote indistinguishable slogans like, ‘leading medicine on the cutting-edge of science-based research-led care.’ But HCAHPS scores allow for more clear comparisons. They come in percentiles. Your competitor can say, ‘This hospital is better than that one,’ on a billboard and provide a data point that wasn’t previously available. So now it’s improve your HCAHPS scores. Then keep improving them. Or else.
