Surveys are a powerful tool that NextPatient offers to see how patients feel about their visit and share those great experiences with others! The Survey tool feature is how Nextpatient helps both with reputation management and new patient acquisition.
SETUP
Before you start managing surveys, you must ensure the settings are setup. In the Settings menu, click Surveys.
The first setting to manage is if you want the surveys to send to patients automatically. By selecting Yes, surveys will be sent to patients immediately -unless another rule or feature prohibits it- when the scheduling appointment is changed to complete.
If this feature is set to No, you can send, Surveys must be sent manually from the Today's Patient Screen. See How to do that below.
Next, you need to specify what text you want the patient to read when they are prompted with the survey either via text message or email. For the text message, keep it to short and concise - less than 200 characters.
The best practice in NextPatient is for survey requests to go out via text message and then be sent via email if that isn't an option. Talk to your account manager at your preference.
In the example above, you'll see the text is gray. That means that the practice has not customized this feature and they default gray text displayed will go out. You will also notice that in the email message, tokens are available allowing for each survey to go out customized with that field. In the example above, the patient's name will be populated into their email reminder.
Here is the list of optional tokens to use:
- #patient# — The patient's first name
- #when# — The appt time, like 'at 2pm' or 'tomorrow at 2pm'
- #practice# — The practice name
- #provider# — The provider's name
- #practice-phone# — The practice's phone number
- #confirm-url# — A special link that a patient can click on to confirm the visit with one click.
- #cancel-url# — A special link that allows the patient to cancel their appointment.
Your implementation and account management team will assist you with the links that need to be setup for reviews. Google, Facebook and Healthgrades are options to have your patients link and review. In the example below, you will see the account is linked to Google with a clickable test link beside it.
Daily email reports and bad score alerts help you become more knowledgeable about how patients are feeling about their visits. You can specify who gets these emails and when.
In the example above, Yes enables the emails to be sent to the listed recipients for both the Daily Email report and alerts for each score below 3. If you are having this report sent to multiple people, be sure their emails are accurate and separated by commas.
To connect NextPatient and your Google Business listing to allow for survey reporting and alerts to be accurate, you must connect the two. To do this, click Connect. You will then be prompted by Google Business to log in. Be sure to use the Google account that is connected to the business. Once you have authorized that properly, this section will look like the below example:
Note: You must still choose your business location. Then the setup will be complete. If you set this up in error or wish to disconnect at any time, click Disconnect. If you have any questions about this process, reach out to implementation or your account manager for help.
The most important part after you've done all of the changes/editing above is to click Update.
SENDING
If you choose to manually send surveys, you'll need to access the Today's Patients screen. You'll notice that no options are given on the right under the Survey column because none of the appointments have a Completed status.
You can click on the patient's name once their appointment has been finished. This will take you to the screen below giving you the option to change the schedule status to completed.
Once you select the completed status and click the Update button, the screen will reload. You'll notice in the example below, the status has changed. You also have the option to manually Send Survey button.
This patient also does not allow for text messages to be sent to them due to their preferences that are setup in NextPatient. When the Today's Patients screen is loaded, you also have the option to manually send there and see the status, as shown below. If the survey hasn't been sent yet, the status will show as Queued.
Based on the above settings, this is what the patient sees in their email and when they click to Google:
Click "Leave a review" then directs them to Google.
REVIEW
After you set up patients reviewing your office, you're going to want to read those to make future strategic decisions and improvements. To access this, click the Surveys tab.
The Summary display is viewed by default. A 30-day summary includes:
- The number of Google clicks (as seen in the above example, it doesn't mean the patient wrote a review)
- Surveys that were sent, and whether it was by email or text.
- An updated rating dashboard of connected accounts, Google in the example below.
Clicking the names of the patients can allow you to access it for further detail.
