For healthcare providers like Legacy Health in Portland, Oregon, patient satisfaction and the quality of care are top priorities. Legacy Health has been a loyal Scantron client since 2000, relying on the company’s evolving suite of survey solutions to meet critical patient-satisfaction survey challenges.
From the front lines of critical patient treatment to outpatient services and chronic care, Legacy’s multiple departments demand customized surveys that must be carefully designed and deployed to capture key non‑HCAHPS patient-satisfaction insights. For the busy quality improvement group at Legacy, that demands a flexible, automated survey solution to meet rigorous day to day needs and deliver fast, high‑quality survey data.
Make Survey Data Drive Stronger Bottom‑Line Results
With the frequent distribution of dozens of different surveys, capturing the right survey data and ensuring data integrity is a high‑stakes operation that requires careful control of custom survey design and deployment.
For more demanding quality-improvement initiatives at larger organizations like Legacy, the limited capabilities of most “freemium” online survey tools simply aren’t advanced enough; “free” is not really free when you don’t get what you need.
In contrast, Scantron’s integrated suite of advanced software, survey tools and scanners are specifically designed for enterprises with more exacting survey needs.
This helps the quality-improvement team at Legacy ensure that the surveys they create meet the needs of their internal client departments before a single survey is ever printed or scanned.
“Our group is routinely managing more than 60 surveys for myriad departments within the healthcare network, and we can’t afford to take chances when it comes to survey design and data collection,” said Julie Lewis, Data Management Specialist at Legacy Health. “Using Scantron’s survey design tools, we can customize and control the design of our paper surveys down to the finest detail to ensure they are capturing the right data.
“Our group is routinely managing more than 60 surveys…we can’t afford to take chances. It was a real breakthrough when we realized that Scantron’s solution could give us the control and integrity we needed—we absolutely love it and Scantron’s support has been there to assist us every step of the way.”
Julie Lewis, Data Management Specialist, Legacy Health
We can then have complete confidence that printed surveys will scan accurately using Scantron scanners to ensure the data integrity our clients demand. It was a real breakthrough when we realized that Scantron’s solution could give us the control and integrity we needed—we absolutely love it and Scantron’s support has been there to assist us every step of the way.”
Multiply the Power of Internal Teams With One Application
In such a demanding quality- management operation with so many active surveys and limited internal resources, it simply isn’t an option to rely on manual data entry and processing. Manual processes are too costly, too prone to error, and too slow.
“Since we are deploying paper-based surveys so extensively within our healthcare network, we absolutely must have an automated solution for scanning and data collection,” adds Lewis. “If we didn’t, we would likely have to increase our department’s headcount by three people to manage manual data entry and processing. That would not only increase labor costs, it would likely compromise the integrity of our data, decrease our response times, and jeopardize our entire quality-management objective. With Scantron’s software and tools, we can get more out of the internal resources we have and meet our quality management commitments.”
To further reduce manual data analysis and deliver integrated survey results, Legacy also benefits by combining results from scanned paper surveys with results from online surveys. SurveyTracker automatically unifies these results into a single database, providing integrated reporting capabilities in cases where survey projects include both survey distribution options.
Protect the Core of Quality Improvement Programs: Patient Privacy
While the quality management group at Legacy has used other hosted, web-based survey tools in the past for selective ad hoc surveys, that approach can introduce privacy risks the group can’t afford to leave to chance.
“While some of the web-based survey tools on the market are useful for more limited survey needs, we just aren’t comfortable with our survey data sitting on the network of an external service provider,” added Lewis. “Our patient records and data are highly confidential and private. With Scantron’s suite of software products, we ensure that we can easily capture survey data and securely store it on our own network for peace of mind.”
Lay the Foundation for Evolution
As Legacy Health continues to evolve its quality management operation, it plans to continue to leverage Scantron’s integrated survey solution for online surveying and data collection, while maintaining the paper-based collection methods still in high demand.
“With Scantron’s full suite of survey solutions at our disposal, we’re confident we can continue to evolve our survey operations to support our future needs,” said Lewis. “Our team really enjoys Scantron’s products, the exceptional support we receive, and the company’s commitment to collaborating on quality-management goals they treat as their own.”
