HQR Customer Satisfaction Survey Case Study

Background

What system does your team support? What are its core functions? Who are its users?

Our system, Hospital Quality Reporting (HQR), supports CMS and other downstream data repositories by collecting, calculating, and reporting on healthcare quality measures for inpatient and outpatient facilities. Its core functions allow users to submit quality measure data, view the outcomes of their submissions, and complete administrative tasks associated with data submissions and reporting. HQR users are staff associated with quality measures at facilities and healthcare systems, vendors who perform services for the providers, and contractors affiliated with CMS.

Goals

What were your goals for launching a customer satisfaction (CSAT) site survey? How do these goals differ from those of other customer research methods you use?

Our goal was to implement a single-ease question survey with which we could evaluate how easy or difficult it is to complete key tasks in HQR, such as submitting data via web forms, submitting bulk data, or viewing reports.

Stakeholders

What stakeholders did you collaborate with to accomplish this work?

We collaborated with our CMS Product Lead and Chief Product Owner team, the CCSQ HCD CoE, the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) team at OSORA, and with the Touchpoints support team at the General Services Administration (GSA).

Approach

What steps did you take to implement your approach? What was the level of effort?

The steps we took were as follows:

• As an HCD team, decide on our approach to the survey (survey goals, what question(s) to ask, how many users to target, etc.)
• Get buy-in from our CMS customers and ADO team
• Apply for PRA permission to survey a percentage of our users
• Work with the PRA team to finalize our application
• Apply to the Technical Direction Board (TDB) to implement Touchpoints in our sandbox and production environments (two applications)
• Establish an account to use the Touchpoints SaaS tool with our CMS Product Lead
• Build out and iterate on the survey in the tool with our CMS Product Lead
• Scope and prioritize development work to implement the survey
• Still to come: complete development, test, and release the survey to users

What questions are included in the survey?

The survey has one question: “Overall, how easy or hard did you find it to complete your task today using Hospital Quality Reporting?” (users then select a response on a scale from 1-5, very easy to very hard).

What was the process like for: PRA, tools, custom development, data analysis/reporting?

The process has taken a very long time and has incorporated many steps, with some steps being uncovered along the way. We have successfully passed each gate, but it’s taken the support of many stakeholders and has been a very gradual process. We are still in the midst of custom development and don’t have experience with data analysis or reporting yet.

What factors made you choose this approach?

We chose to use Touchpoints because we wanted to implement a site-intercept user survey, and we believed that, as a government-created and supplied tool, it would be easier to get the approvals and do the implementation.

Learnings / Challenges

What are your key learnings from the project? What recommendations would you make for other teams who will begin this work soon?

So far, our key learning has been to allow ample time, and seek key stakeholder support, for PRA and TDB approvals.

Is there anything you would have done differently? Why?

We started with a plan to evaluate key user tasks, vs overall user satisfaction, and in retrospect it might have been easier to implement the tool with a single question as a generic survey rather than making it task-specific. Our developer seems to have gotten it working fairly easily (submit a web form, see the survey) but it still might have been easier to go with a more straightforward implementation first for approvals and testing. 

Results / Metrics

What has the outcome of your work been to date?

Do you have metrics from the CSAT survey? If so, how has your team used these to improve the customer experience?

We are still in the implementation phase, so we don’t have outcomes or metrics to report on yet.

Next Steps for HQR

What are your next steps for this work?

We have to complete back-end development and test the survey for accessibility compliance.

The HCD Center of Excellence is Here to Help!

The HCD Center of Excellence is here to support you as you participate in the CCSQ-wide goal of increasing customer satisfaction research. We can partner with you through key tasks, such as: 

• Establish and test a site intercept survey tool
• Determine questions for satisfaction, ease of use, and efficiency
• Define a statistically relevant sample for continuous data collection
• Resolve PRA coverage and Information Collection Request (ICR) for site intercept survey
• Complete and submit Third Party Website and Applications (TPWA) form for the site intercept tool
• Determine approach for survey display 
• Establish a plan for leveraging ongoing customer data

  Use the buttons below to email us or submit a project intake through Confluence and our team will follow up with you shortly. And learn more about the Customer Service Initiative>>