The data can then be analyzed according to such factors as time registered or the gender of the patient. To support his point, David Gustafson, Ph.D., professor of industrial engineering and preventive medicine at UWH, refers to a study of organizations with quality improvement programs, published in an April issue of The Economist. Some of the CQI programs studied were successful, but two-thirds were not. The key finding of the article, he says, was that the extent to which an organization maintains a customer focus determines the difference between quality efforts that fail and quality efforts that succeed. For hospitals, this means taking a second look at how they collect data on customer needs.
Breast cancer fears.
UWH applied this focus on customer needs to a survey of 400 breast cancer patients, their partners and their adult children. The survey results indicated that patients needed to access information quickly and communicate with other breast cancer patients privately. The success of the computer-lending program exemplifies the difference between surveying customer needs vs. surveying customer satisfaction, says Gustafson. The feeling of panic that patients expressed about that experience was tremendous. Once needs are understood, hospitals can then devise a satisfaction survey that can provide baseline monitoring of how well needs are being met, he adds.