An Early Warning System for Doctors
Identifying performance issues and creating an alert system to limit the impact of negative experiences before they grow out of hand.
The Challenge
Most companies have continuous tracking studies in place to monitor their customers’ experiences. Every day, new customer experiences are added to yesterday’s dataset, and every day those key performance indicators can change. Monitoring customer experience data for trends or significant changes is a laborious, and hence, often neglected task. And if monitoring those customer experience results become the responsibility of local management across various departments, teams or strategic business units of the organization, making sure they are paying attention to their performance can be even more difficult. Our client’s leadership needed to know about patient experience problems as they arise. But they were not looking for one more report; they wanted an alerting system that would notify them, and other appropriate individuals, indicating when and where there are areas of concern.
The Solution
An Early Warning System was developed, tied to the online reporting system, providing service alerts when scores fall below, or even above (to acknowledge high performance), pre-set thresholds. These thresholds were a combination of scoring trends (i.e., two or three periods of deteriorating scores in a row), changes that qualify as being statistically significant, and changes that are of an order of magnitude that is still determined to be substantial, even if not statistically significant. Alerts were set at the department or store level, notifying the managers of the concern, along with a summary report to senior management of all the individual alerts that were identified.