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Health System Finds Success With ‘Ad hoc’ Surveys

Posted on by AutoData

In a reoccurring segment on our blog,  we’d like to highlight another customer’s success with our software. The customer we’d like to highlight is a unified health system of physicians, hospitals, and communities located in and serving a large metro area in the Midwest. This health system has state of the art neo-natal, obstetrics, and perinatal care centers which offer a variety of different services for pregnant women, newborns, and families. Year after year, this health system consistently delivers the most babies in their respective state.

They have used AutoData’s survey scanning software for nine years and counting.

“We use the software for all of our ‘ad hoc’ surveys,” says a planning manager for the health system’s Corporate Planning and Business Development group. Whether it’s a one-time survey or a monthly survey, they use Scannable Office to gather and measure important information for many different projects within the health system.

“As an example,” he says, “our Primary Stroke Center is a ‘Joint Commission Certified Center for Excellence’ in treating stroke patients, which requires abiding by a certain set of standards.” One standard set forth by the Joint Commission is to provide patient feedback. “We use Scannable Office to create the survey and mail them to discharged stroke patients.” They receive the evaluations back from the patients, scan the surveys using Scannable Office, tabulate and create reports on the data, and then send that information to the Primary Stroke Center. The information is then analyzed and studied by the stroke center which assists in providing education to patients and focuses on secondary prevention.

On top of being a Certified Center for Excellence, and as mentioned above, the health system is a leader in neo-natal, obstetrics, and perinatal care. A key part of the system’s high quality care in those specialized areas is the wide array of maternity classes they offer. “We also use Scannable Office to evaluate all of our maternity care classes,” says the planning manager, “the data we collect is turned into trend charts for analysis and to communicate how to improve our classes.” Consistently striving to improve their programs and classes contributes to the great success their hospitals have experienced.

They also use our paper scanning software within their residency programs. Providing patient feedback on the residents is an integral part of how the health system teaches, and subsequently produces, great doctors. The data collected from the patients is used to give each resident a scorecard reflecting their work, giving the future doctors the opportunity to examine their strengths and weaknesses.

Further, the health system uses Scannable Office for at least a half dozen other surveys. The planning manager has found that Scannable Office serves a great niche function in his hospitals. “While we outsource all of our health system’s patient satisfaction surveys due to sheer volume, we have found Scannable Office gives us the flexibility and autonomy needed for successfully administering the dozens of ‘ad hoc’ surveys across our hospitals.”

AutoData’s software’s ability to allow its user to have full control over the creation, distribution, and reporting of surveys has helped numerous customers improve organizational processes, cut costs, and most importantly, provide higher quality care.

ExpertScan vs. Scannable Office: Part 2 – Reporting the data

Posted on by AutoData

 

In a prior post, we briefly explained the differences in creating forms with our two main survey scanning solutions – Scannable Office and ExpertScan. In this post, we will explain the other main difference between the two products: reporting the data.

An important reason customers choose to use our software is to clearly understand the data they collect. Whether it’s measuring patient care or customer experience, the data doesn’t mean much if you don’t understand it or if you can’t convey it clearly to others. In general, it’s much easier to convey raw data through visuals (bar graphs, pie charts, line graphs, etc.). This is where ExpertScan comes in handy.

ExpertScan has automatic reporting built into the software. When you scan in your form or survey, the software creates a handful of different reports on the data automatically. With the click of a mouse, a window pops up with a question-by-question breakdown and option to view the data in bar graphs, pie charts, trend analysis, etc.. ExpertScan also has tabulation rules that allow you to parse out certain types of data. For example, if you have a patient satisfaction survey which is used in multiple hospitals, ExpertScan’s reporting allows you to see the differences, question-by-question, between those different hospitals or even the different doctors. These reports can be easily converted to PDF files and disseminated to appropriate personnel. Further, all of the raw data scanned into your computer also gets saved in a separate Microsoft Access database.

While Scannable Office offers more options in form creation, it does not offer the automatic reporting features that ExpertScan has. With Scannable Office, the data can be uploaded directly to any ODBC compliant database – Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, MySQL, Oracle, Filemaker Pro, etc. Once in the database, one’s options to manipulate and report on the data are endless. However, the options are limited to the user’s experience working with any of the aforementioned databases.

Customers who come from smaller organizations or have less experience working in ODBC compliant databases love the automatic reporting ExpertScan provides. Customers who work in large institutions sometimes prefer Scannable Office because they have the personnel and resources to do much more analysis with the data in ODBC compliant databases.

So there you have it: A brief description on the differences in reporting your data (and previously – from creation). As stated, these are the two most distinct differences between ExpertScan and Scannable Office. But we’d love to chat with you about further nuances between the two! Feel free to contact us directly at any time!