Patients Matter at Health Partnership Clinic

Every year, 15,000 patients walk through Health Partnership Clinic’s (HPC) doors seeking health services—medical, behavioral health and dental.

Many battle chronic diseases; others struggle with mental issues and yet others face challenges of homelessness, abuse, loss of a job or a myriad of other stressors.

It’s our mission to provide quality care. That means we must always look for ways to improve care and do what’s right for our patients.

At HPC, we know that patients have the right to choose where to go for their health care, and we want to be their provider of choice—their medical home. That’s why patient satisfaction is a top priority at HPC.

How do we know if we’re meeting our patients’ expectations? And doing it consistently?

The best way is to ask our patients. Last summer we revamped our survey tool as well as incorporated questions that are required from grant funders and our Patient-Centered Medical Home Recognition program.

Our questions ranged from the registration process, phones and front desk check in to provider/support staff, billing/payment process and behavioral health services.

In November 2017, 3,453 patients, who received services between July 1 and Sept. 30, 2017, received a survey (either in English or Spanish) request via email.

• More than 480 responded, resulting in a 14 percent response rate, with a confidence level of 94 percent and a margin of error of only four percent.
• Besides the great response rate, overall, our satisfaction results were positive.

One of the key questions I pay special attention to is “How likely is it that you would recommend HPC to your friends and family?” Our English responders indicated 84 percent and our Spanish patients indicated 87 percent.

In addition, our team pays close attention to our patients’ overall experience related to our facility, billing/payment process and the care we provide.

I wanted to share a few of our English results:

Next Steps

Our Quality Assurance and Senior Leadership Teams have reviewed the results and plan to tackle the following four issues:

• Experience related to Overall Care: Communication related to delays
• Experience related to Overall Care: Wait time-test results
• Experience related to Billing/Payment: Explanation/Requirements
• Experience related to Billing/Payment: Collections

Senior leaders will work with staff to develop Performance Improvement Plans in the coming weeks. Our goal is to re-survey patients in April for patients we’ve seen from October 2017-March 2018.

We appreciate the great feedback we received from our patients. This feedback, along with our dedicated staff, will help us continue to strengthen a culture of safety and quality at Health Partnership.