In today's competitive health care market, customers have high expectations of a quality experience. Ongoing improvement of customer service is critical to the sustainability of any health care provider. Here are guidelines for developing and implementing a continuous quality improvement program at your organization.
Instructions
1. Establish a quality improvement committee/team to develop the organization's quality improvement plan and guide its implementation.
2. Evaluate your organization to determine areas that need improvement. Customer surveys are valuable tools for organizational assessment.
3. Design customer surveys to be broad based and distribute them to existing and potential customers.
4. Use the results of the customer surveys to help you identify customer-service problems.
5. Compare your organization's services and processes to other organizations that set best practice standards. This process is called "benchmarking."
6. Look to other industries for innovative solutions. Most health care processes have counterparts in other businesses. (Example: You might resolve long patient wait times by examining the efficiency of automated airline check-ins).
7. Expand social marketing and community-relations efforts to establish a positive brand identity to the public.
8. Look beyond the provider-patient relationship in critiquing your organization's customer service. The total experience of customer service includes your organization's facility, policies and procedures, available treatment options, cultural competence, professional licensure/credentialing and aftercare practices.
9. Monitor and assess customer satisfaction on a continuous basis. This effort will quantify your organization's performance so that your quality improvement efforts will be scientifically based and data-driven. Gathering customer feedback will strengthen provider-patient partnerships.
10. Ensure that your employees are adequately trained in quality improvement and understand their contributions in assuring total customer satisfaction. The most successful organizations are those in which continuous quality improvement becomes a way of life.
Tags: quality improvement, your organization, health care, continuous quality, continuous quality improvement