An automated practice-based patient survey

1. An automated practice-based patient survey Goal: to demonstrate the feasibility and acceptability of an automated practice-based patient survey

2. Automating patient outreach • Survey based on existing technology, already adopted by primary care practices, to send automated patient phone, email, text message reminders for appointments, practice notifications, etc.

3. Patient survey • Short survey sent by email or automated phone call within 72 hours of visit to a practice • Phone up to 4 retries • Email sent once with link to on-line survey

4. Survey questions in English or French • At your last visit with your family doctor or nurse practitioner, how good was the doctor or nurse at giving you enough time on a scale from 1 to 5? • Thinking about the care you received from ALL the persons you saw in ALL the places you received care over the past 12 months, were there times when the person you were seeing did not know about changes in your treatment plan that another person recommended on a scale from 1 to 3, where 1 is never or rarely and 3 is often or very often?

5. Mode preference by age

6. Mode preference by income

7. Mode preference by chronic condition

8. Response rates by mode and income

9. Lessons learned • Automated survey is feasible • Language preference easy to incorporate • Email response rates appear significantly better than phone • Age and income differences in email vs phone preference as well as response rates.

10. Cost • Cost of current commercial patient survey services • $50-$100/500 surveys • Cost of tailored EMR linked “premium” survey $35/100 surveys

11. Future directions- direct from EMR • As part of QI or CPD, deploy survey directly from EMR like appointment reminder systems: • deployed by preset parameters at specified times and intervals, eg: • random selection within age group • If not seen in two years • After visit for PHE

12. Future directions- link to patient service • APS linked to routine automated patient outreach: • CPD update • flu shot clinics notices • appointment reminders • preventive care information • change of clinic hours notices, etc. • Increase patient buy-in • Justify cost with added service