At the forefront of every healthcare professional is the patient. This means that what they are saying is instrumental for the success of your optometry practice. Patient feedback should never be overlooked, regardless of whether or not it is positive or negative because it influences your practice’s success and can tell you if you’re going to lose business, grow, or simply maintain the status quo. To discover the satisfaction of your patients, one of the most simplistic, yet influential and indicating systems is the Net Promoter System, which is used to find your Net Promoter Score.
Finding Your Score
An NPS, Net Promoter Score, is a score used to measure patient satisfaction based on one question – Using a scale of 0-10 (0 not at all or 10 being extremely likely), how likely would you be to recommend us to a friend or colleague? This question is usually followed up with a text box to answer why and should be asked immediately following a patient experience, whether it is through an e-mail, text alert, paper or electronic survey or an additional effective media source. The following process and formula can be used to find your Net Promoter Score.
Each response is scaled with a number between 0 and 10. These numbers fall into the specific categories below:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Detractors (0-6)
These patients are those who view your practice in a negative way and are likely to spread negative noise to other people. This can be detrimental to your clinic and should be taken into account immediately to change the results.
Passives (7-8)
Passives are the patients who have a good experience, but didn’t have a great experience. They are satisfied with their results but aren’t likely to be your first advocate or may even be open to switching practices. Tweaking just one thing may be what changes them from passive to promoter.
Promoters (9-10)
Promoters could also be known as your advocates. They are loyal and excited to be seen by you, which can influence growth in a positive way because they’re going to be willing to talk highly of their experience.
To find your Net Promoter Score, first add up and find the percentages of each category by taking the number of scores within each category and dividing it by the total number of scores. Next, use the following formula to find your NPS, or Net Promoter Score, which will range between -100 and 100.
Promoters (%) – Detractors (%) = NPS
For example, your practice has a total of 30 patient scores. Thirteen of these scores are in the detractor range (0-6), 8 are in the passive range (7-8), and the remaining 9 are in the promoter range (9-10).
This results in a 43% detractor score, a 27% passive score, and a 30% promoter score. Using the formula provided above, it can be found that our net promoter score is
30% Promoter – 43% Detractor = – 13
To determine if you have a good Net Promoter Score, a common general rule is that a 30-40 is good, 50-80 is very good and above is excellent. If anything is below a 10, measures should definitely be taken.
Implementing the Score
The results you gather are a great resource to measure how well your practice is doing with its’ patients. The Net Promoter Score can give you a score that reflects the practice overall, and as an owner, it may serve more beneficial to see the Net Promoter Score to better understand the status of your practice.
Individual scores can provide information related to the details the come from your practice day to day. If you are managing a department, individual scores may provide the best pieces of information. For example, is your clinic getting negative or positive responses from patients that interact with a certain Doctor, Lab Technician or even piece of equipment? Did the detractors have a bad interaction with someone in the administrative staff or was there an explanation provided as to why they wouldn’t recommend your practice?
The Net Promoter Score system can be used as a hard piece of data that can help your clinic reflect and identify the strengths and weaknesses within your organization. Acquiring a great Net Promoter Score starts with you, but ends with the most important person – the patient.
