In the hustle of pharmacy management, providing exceptional patient care and ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction are top priorities for pharmacy owners. Here’s how you can break down tracking customer satisfaction to create more recurring and repeat business for your pharmacy.
As a pharmacist or pharmacy owner, you already know the importance of delivering top-notch patient care and creating positive experiences for them. However, achieving these objectives requires more than just good intentions—it requires data-driven insights and strategic decision-making.
Data-based decisions are where these Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come into play. By tracking specific metrics related to patient care and customer satisfaction, pharmacy owners can gain valuable insights into their operations and identify areas for improvement.
Just as there are KPIs for cash flow or marketing, tracking patient service ones will help you to know if you and your staff are providing awesome service. Following are specific KPIs you can track related to patient care and satisfaction.
Wait Times: Enhancing Efficiency
One of the most critical aspects of patient care in a pharmacy is minimizing wait times. Long wait times can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction among customers, impacting their overall experience.
By tracking wait times as a KPI, pharmacy owners can identify bottlenecks in their workflow and implement strategies to streamline processes.
If you find that your wait times could lose some weight, here are a few tips.
- Adjust staffing levels to accommodate busier times.
- Use automation features in your pharmacy management system.
- Have employees in their zone of genius position – your fastest typist inputting prescriptions.
- Reduce phone calls with an IVR system.
Prescription Fill Accuracy: Ensuring Patient Safety
Accuracy is paramount when filling prescriptions in a pharmacy. Any errors or mistakes can have serious consequences for patient safety. Tracking prescription fill accuracy as a KPI allows pharmacy owners to monitor their performance in this critical area.
By analyzing error rates and implementing quality control measures, such as double-checking prescriptions or using barcode scanning technology, pharmacies can minimize errors and ensure that patients receive the correct medications every time.
Errors vary widely, from billing and clerical errors to wrong drug or patient errors. No matter how small, they all matter. Many times, pharmacies do a great job of stopping major errors. Even minor clerical errors can break the trust you have with employees and cause you to lose a significant amount of money in an audit.
Here’s how I track errors in my pharmacy. You don’t need to do this all the time (unless you want). It can be a good exercise to deploy once or twice a year or when significant staffing changes have happened.
The pharmacist gets a sheet of paper with each typist and technician’s name listed down the page. If any error, no matter how small, is caught by the pharmacist, a simple tally mark goes by the responsible employee’s name. At the end of each day, the tally marks are reviewed, and then weekly, they are added to a scoreboard. This tracking can help uncover if an employee needs additional training.
Medication Counseling Sessions: Empowering Patients
In addition to dispensing medications, pharmacists play a vital role in providing medication counseling to patients. These sessions offer an opportunity for patients to ask questions, address concerns, and gain a better understanding of their medications and treatment plans.
Tracking the number of medication counseling sessions as a KPI can help pharmacy owners gauge the effectiveness of their patient education efforts. By encouraging your pharmacy team members to proactively engage with patients and provide ongoing training and support, pharmacies can empower patients to take an active role in their healthcare and improve medication adherence.
You can track the number of times patients are asked for a consult and the number who accept. Then, you can take the initiative to really push for more patients to say yes. Of course, the choice is theirs, and we all know that a gentle nudge from employees can make a big difference.
Patient Feedback Scores: Listening to the Voice of the Customer
Patient feedback is invaluable for pharmacies looking to improve their services and enhance customer satisfaction. Tracking patient feedback scores as a KPI allows pharmacy owners to measure customer satisfaction levels and identify areas for improvement.
Whether through surveys, online reviews, or direct feedback, pharmacies can gather valuable insights into the patient experience and use this information to make informed decisions.
Make it EASY to collect this date. Put QR codes in your pharmacy that link to a quick Google form. Or use a service that texts your patients. Always offer a way to give feedback anonymously. While you might like to know who said what, getting accurate and insightful data is more important. People are more likely to tell you bad things if they stay anonymous.
These are just a few examples. A great way to start with patient service KPIs is to talk to your team. Get their input and buy-in from the beginning.
No matter what you choose to track, be sure to continuously monitor and optimize these KPIs to improve efficiency, ensure patient safety, empower patients, and ultimately deliver a better overall experience for your patients.
