Becoming Better Partners With Patients

Partnering with NRC Health, a patient-experience vendor, allows Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) to have a better understanding of every patient’s experience with immediate visibility into service issues. Patient concerns can be addressed quickly, and specific changes can be made to improve the overall patient experience moving forward. This direct insight will help foster a relationship-centric partnership between LVHN providers and patients, and increase patient loyalty. 

Lehigh Valley Physician Group (LVPG) partnered with NRC Health in 2019.

In July 2021, LVHN Inpatient, Emergency and Outpatient Services began using the service as well. The goal was to collect more timely feedback from patients about their experiences through their real-time feedback program. “We felt we were not receiving adequate information in our patient satisfaction surveys, ” says Joseph DeFulvio, DO, Chief Medical Officer, Regional Campuses and Integration, LVPG. “To best serve our patients, we asked, ‘How can we optimize our interactions and modify our outreach to meet their needs?’”

Real-time feedback provides email, phone and text message survey options, sent shortly after a hospital stay, outpatient test or LVPG in-person and virtual visits. DeFulvio shared the premise behind Real-Time surveying is for us to be better partners with our patients. “We are now able to provide service recovery when necessary within a 48-hour loyalty window,” he says. 

“Working toward common key metrics to achieve greater patient satisfaction has become a very positive team-building experience for LVHN providers and staff,” says Leilani Souders, Patient Experience Operations Specialist, LVHN.

“We all work together to improve our processes based on patient feedback.”

The data from the surveys is housed in a user-friendly portal that allows teams to identify patterns and inconsistencies, and provides key metrics regarding achieving greater patient satisfaction.

NRC Health also offers Community Insights, a program that brings LVHN patients together in a virtual panel to share feedback regarding service offerings or health topics.

“We have received actionable data from this partnership,” DeFulvio says. “Our survey response rate has increased significantly with Real-Time surveying and we continue to receive better, more timely information from our patients.”