Real-time Answers to Your Questions

Outpatient services are moving away from mailing patient satisfaction surveys and will now be surveying patients within a few days of their appointment by phone or email.

This new process will provide feedback quicker, so we can make we can rapidly respond to service issues, provide prompt recognition to care providers and better adapt to changing consumer expectations.

What is Real-time?

Real-time is a patient survey tool that makes it easier for patients to provide timely, relevant feedback about their experiences. By gaining patient insights more quickly, we can rapidly respond to service issues, provide prompt recognition to care providers and better adapt to changing consumer expectations. Real-time is currently partially live in our Emergency Departments and is being used to sample a small percentage of patients. Those results have shown an increase in responses and more timely data.

Who does this effect?

Houston Methodist rolled out Real-time beginning January 1, 2019 discharges, to non-inpatient areas:

• Ambulatory Surgery
• Outpatient Services
• Emergency Departments will transition to 100% Real-time

Why are we changing?

Real-time expands our ability to survey patients and family members and understand their expectations and experiences better. For example, collecting feedback from younger patients has historically been difficult, since those patients tend to be less responsive to traditional means of surveying. With Real-time, we will collect more feedback via email and interactive voice response (IVR) for more accurate feedback, in days rather than weeks after a patient’s visit.

Using Real-time, we can:

• Identify root causes and prioritize efforts to improve patient experience
• Act upon emerging trends before they escalate into larger problems
• Perform real-time service recovery for at-risk patients
• Better understand data and feedback with a new user-friendly reporting platform that includes customizable and role-specific dashboards

What do I need to do today?

Keep a lookout for additional information on the transition to Real-time surveying. For questions, contact Velma Escamilla at vrescamilla@houstonmethodist.org or 281.274.0191.

Download the full FAQ flyer here. You can also download the patient flyer here.