Issue #7 – Thinking Thursdays TIPs for M3-Patient Experience Users and Leaders

Jerry StoneThinking Thursdays TIPs0 Comments

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Issue 7, May 2, 2019

In this week’s issue :
– Top Box Score:  How is it Calculated and Does it Include Skipped Questions
– How to Encourage Patients to Leave Comments on a Specific Question
– Benchmarking:  How to Compare Your Practice and Your Providers

Happy Reading 🙂

Top Box Score:  How is it Calculated and Does it Include Skipped Questions

Over that last several years the “Top Box” score has become the go-to metric for many healthcare organizations.  While Average Ratings are still used, CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), and other national level organizations rely heavily on the use of Top Box scores when measuring and comparing service quality across healthcare.
So, exactly what is “Top Box”?  The “Top Box” score refers to the percentage of survey respondents that give the most positive response available.  For example, using the question with the 4-point rating scale below, a rating of “Always” is considered the Top Box answer.
In the last 6 months, how often are the clerks and receptionists at this provider’s office as helpful as you thought they should be?
    Always
    Usually
    Sometimes
    Never
As far as how the Top Box score is calculated, it’s actually pretty straight forward; simply count the number of patients that provided a Top Box answer (Always in this example) and divide by the total number of patients that answered the question.
To keep the math simple, let’s say 10 patients answered the Receptionist Helpful question above and and six (6) of those patients provided a rating of “Always”.  The Top Box score is calculated as:  6 divided by 10, multiplied by 100, e.g.,  (6 / 10 x 100 = 60% Top Box).
Whenever a patient skips a question, or does not answer for whatever reason, that patient’s “missing” response is completely ignored and it does not impact the Top Box score, good or bad.
If you would like to double-check your practice’s Top Box scores, just follow these steps.
1) Login to M3-Patient Experience
2) Click “Reporting”
3) Click “Detailed Results”
From the “Detailed Results” page, select a date range and then click “Export Ratings to Excel”.  A spreadsheet will appear that contains the detailed survey response data for your practice.
Helpful TIP:  Whenever you are downloading a significant amount of data, use the “Export Numeric to Excel” feature, which will download answer values instead of answer text.
When you open the spreadsheet you’ll see column headings across the top of the page.  Scroll to the right and find the column heading representing the question that you would like to double check.  From the selected column, count the total number of patients that answered the question.  Now, from that same column, count the number of patients that provided the best possible answer, i.e. “Always” on the 4-point scale, or “Strongly Agree” on the 5-point scale.  On the questions that use a 0 to 10 point scale, such as the Recommend question and the Provider Rating question, a score of a “10” or a “9” counts as a Top Box answer.  Counting both 10’s and 9’s as Top Box answers aligns with CMS’ scoring methodology and other national healthcare organizations.
Please know that “Detailed Results” will include the patient’s name and other information considered PHI, as such, please remember to treat and handle “Detailed Results”, and other M3 reports, so that all HIPAA regulations are met.

How to Encourage Patients to Leave Comments on a Specific Question

As an admin-level user for your practice’s M3 survey your M3 access rights will allow you to turn-on the “Comment on This” feature for any of the individual questions presented to your patients. For example, let’s say you have recently hired a new receptionist and you would like to encourage patients to leave comments on the Receptionist Helpful question. Below are steps that will allow you to turn-on the “Comment on This” feature, for a specific question.

1) Login to M3-Patient Experience
2) Click “Manage Survey”
3) Click “Manage Questions”

When the “Manage Questions” page loads up scroll down to the desired question and click “on” the check box that reads, “Allow Comments on this Question?”. Then, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click the “Update Questions” button to save your changes.

Quesion-specific patient comments may be reviewed from the “Flash Report” and from the “Detailed Results” page.

Benchmarking:  How to Compare Your Practice and Your Providers

1) Login to M3-Patient Experience
2) Click “Reporting”
3) Click “Benchmark Comparisons”

When the “Benchmark Comparisons” page loads up, set the parameters as desired. From the “MedicalGPS” drop-down, select a specialty, such as “Cardiology” or select “All Specialities” for an aggregated comparison to all specialties within the MedicalGPS database.

We hope you are finding Thinking Thursdays TIPs useful.  If so, drop me an email and let me know your thoughts.  If you don’t automatically receive Thinking Thursdays TIPs in your inbox, subscribe here.

Please let our support team know if you need anything.  Whenever you need help, please find support at www.medicalgps.com/support.
Just save the support link to your favorites and simply click it when you need assistance.  If you don’t see what you need, after the support page loads up, scroll down and click, “I have a question not listed here?” 
Have a great Thinking Thursday! 
Jerry
 
Jerry L. Stone
Co-Founder/COO
MedicalGPS, LLC

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