The Ultimate Patient Shadowing Secret Weapon

How GoShadow Can Keep Your Patients Happy

If you ask healthcare professionals why they do what they do, virtually all of them will give you the same answer: they want to help people. But how do you figure out if the service you’re providing is the best it can be? How do you know if– and more importantly how– you can improve the experience your patients have in your office or hospital? Patient shadowing is the fastest, most direct way to gather information about patient experiences, and GoShadow is the ultimate patient shadowing tool to help you gather feedback, stay organized, and keep your patients happy.

Keep reading to learn:

• Why patient shadowing is the most effective way to get patient experience feedback
• What GoShadow is and how it works
• How you can use GoShadow to start improving your patient experiences today.

Sorting through survey and interview feedback for the information you need can be tedious.

Not All Feedback is Helpful Feedback

When it comes to gathering information from users– whether they are clients, customers, or in this case patients– there are plenty of ways you can go about getting feedback, and not all of them are created equal. For example, surveys and interviews seem like great options at first glance. All you have to do is put together a set of questions, and then you can reuse it over and over again to gather a ton of qualitative and quantitative data. But it isn’t quite that simple– there’s a lot of overhead associated with creating a good survey, and even then all of the work you put into your questions may not get you the high quality data you’re looking for.

A patient who has an extremely positive or extremely negative experience to report will have plenty of feedback for you, but the average patient might not give their full time or attention to your questions. What does that look like?

• Lots “Neither Agree Nor Disagree” options selected
• Skipped questions
• All positive answers, but no specific details or constructive criticism
• All negative answers, but no specific details or constructive criticism

That doesn’t give you a very accurate idea of what your patient experience is like. Luckily, patient shadowing is a great way to avoid these hassles and learn what you’re actually doing well and where you can improve.

Patient shadowing is the best way to find out how they actually view and experience your care.

The Secret to Finding Out What Patients Really Think

So what is patient shadowing anyway? It’s the closest you can get to seeing your practice through a patient’s eyes. Patient shadowing is the direct, real-time observation of patients and their families as they move through their care experience. When you observe a patient experience as it unfolds, you are able to capture and document objective and subjective details about their care experience that you might not be able to uncover otherwise.

A patient who is actively experiencing care isn’t concerned about hurting your feelings by raising a critical point. They’re just trying to have a meaningful visit and receive the care that they need. Patient shadowing is your ticket into the world of your patients, where their feedback is as honest and authentic (and therefore helpful!) as possible.

Just like you need the right tools to keep patients healthy, you need the right tools to understand their experience.

GoShadow is the Essential Tool Every Patient Shadower Needs

Like any other strategy, patient shadowing comes with its fair share of challenges. Even if you’ve never shadowed a patient before, you can probably guess what many of those major challenges are. The reason that GoShadow is such an essential tool to patient shadowers is that it simplifies challenges like:

• Keeping the patient shadowing experience patient and family centered
• Easily recording a high volume of information in a short time
• Organizing and sharing data
• Turning a patient shadowing experience into actionable insights
• Facilitating continuous improvement

Challenge 1: Patient-Centered and Family-Centered Shadowing

Conducting tests about how patients view and experience the care they receive is a key part of a maintaining a patient and family-centered medical practice. It’s all about listening to the patient and finding the most effective and most efficient way to meet their needs. GoShadow makes patient shadowing easier than ever before, which empowers you to shadow more patients and hear more voices. It’s the best way to get honest feedback directly from your patients!

Challenge 2: Keeping Up with Care in Real Time

If you’ve ever tried to keep detailed meeting or lecture notes, you know how difficult it can be to capture information in real time. When it comes to patient shadowing, it’s essential to have the right tools to record information. If the method you choose can’t keep up, you risk losing valuable information about the patient experience you’re shadowing. GoShadow allows you to take rapid-fire notes while shadowing. You can categorize notes and attach pictures, allowing you to quickly capture a complete picture of the experience for you to reference later.

Challenge 3: Organizing and Sharing Data

One of the biggest challenges with any data gathering project is keeping notes organized. GoShadow was built on an understanding of how important organization is to getting value from data, and it’s built into every feature of the app. GoShadow lets you organize experiences into smaller segments. That means that you can break the broad “Patient Intake” experience as many smaller experiences as you want. GoShadow also keeps your shadow experiences organized by supporting:

• Invitations for other shadowers to collaborate on specific segments
• Timestamping every experience
• Tracking people and places associated with each experience
• Flagging notes as specific opportunities for improvement

Challenge 4: Analysis and Reporting

Your notes can’t improve patient experiences if they never make it off of your phone, which is why GoShadow includes powerful analysis and reporting tools. You can sync all of your patient experience notes using the GoShadow platform and use GoShadow’s report generator to create a complete narrative of the patient experience. You can export your report as standalone PDF or as a part of a larger presentation depending on what the most effective method for distributing data is for your practice.

Challenge 5: Continuous Improvement

Patient shadowing isn’t designed to be a discrete project. After you implement changes based on the insights you gain from patient shadowing, GoShadow is the perfect tool for re-shadowing to see your improvements in actions!

The patient’s health and happiness is top priority in healthcare. Understand your patients better with patient shadowing and GoShadow.

Healthcare professionals are united by a desire to help people. In order to help as many people as effectively as possible, it’s essential to understand and improve the experience patients have with your medical practice. Simplify patient shadowing and discover how you can keep your patients happy with GoShadow today!