Should The Healthcare Industry Do Away With Paper Based Feedback Forms Once And For All?

I recently visited a hospital and noticed that at the payment and reception counters they were displaying paper-based feedback forms, with boxes next to them to deposit them in. Since I had a moment, I decided to fill one up, if for no other reason, but to get a sense of the experience of filling one up.

Upon picking one up, I looked around for a pen and all I encountered was a chain with a pen missing from the end of it. I asked the lady at the reception for a pen and after some futile searching she passed me her pen, while mentioned she needed it back soon. When I opened up the feedback form I found that it was a feedback form designed for patients to fill in after they had left the hospital and not while there were still there. And that put an end to any possibility of me providing some good feedback on the kind nurses who were attending to a friend who had been admitted to the hospital.

Nevertheless, I decided to give the questions a good look over and realised how difficult they were to read with the words and circles for filling in my answers all cramped together. Also the legend on what the circles related to was only represented at the top of the page, forcing me to constantly look up and down if I wanted to fill in the circles accurately. Furthermore, the question heading were such that while they were dealing with different dimensions of a patients experience such as Appointment Booking, Counter Staff, Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacy, etc… there was no guarantee the patient had actually encountered those dimensions as part of their patient journey.

I started wondering how frustrating an experience this would be for a patient, how limited it would be for a patient’s caregiver and how pointless it would be for a visitor like me who had decided to provide some encouraging feedback for the nurses who could do with some uplifting. It also started occurring to me how many of these forms were incomplete and never even made it to the boxes, but ended up in the nearby trash bin. And even if they were filled in, what was the human cost of administering all of this. Think about it… someone had to design the forms, print the forms, distribute the forms, supply writing material, collect the forms, translated the data from a paper to a digital copy and then analyse it; if it ever got to that. How much time and money was being wasted on doing this and how limited the analytics were. How long did it take the analytics to get into the hands of those who could do anything to recover a bad experience, and if indeed it actually got into those hands at all. I summarily put the form back where I picked it up from and walked away, thinking to myself, at least the nice lady at the reception got her pen back fast.

I am sure you have your point of view on this too. So, should the healthcare industry do away with paper based feedback forms once and for all?