Customer Satisfaction

I had the opportunity to speak one-to-one with many accredited DME suppliers recently at a pharmacy trade show. The majority had been accredited for more than a year, and many had questions about the challenges of maintaining their accreditation requirements.

As I was chatting with one supplier about maintaining his quarterly performance management requirements, another approached as we were discussing the requirement to assess customer satisfaction. The first supplier said he was having difficulty getting customer satisfaction surveys returned by mail from his customers. Added the second, "We had trouble getting surveys back, so we stopped doing them."

He said his company had distributed customer satisfaction surveys when it first became accredited, but after three months, very few had been returned. So, the surveys weren't tallied and the results weren't reviewed.

I was surprised when this supplier so casually offered that his company wasn't making any effort to complete the requirement. It was clear he felt the task was simply a good idea or maybe an option.

But it's more than that. Let's review the CMS performance management requirements.

In its final quality standards, CMS defines the performance management outcomes that an accredited supplier must track. These include:

• Beneficiary satisfaction and complaints;
• Timeliness of response to questions, problems and concerns;
• Impact of business practices on adequacy of beneficiary access to items, services, information;
• Frequency of billing/coding errors; and
• Adverse events to beneficiaries due to inadequate service(s) or malfunctioning equipment and/or item(s) (e.g injuries, accidents, signs and symptoms of infection, hospitalization).

I took a few minutes to remind the supplier of these requirements and emphasized that they are indeed requirements, not suggestions. On accreditation surveys, your accreditor will ask you to produce a copy of your quarterly and annual performance management data. If you don't have it, you will be cited with a deficiency and, at the very least, you will need to create a plan of correction to show how you will stay compliant with these requirements.

It's not always an easy process. So, how do you do it?

Some very large suppliers contract with national survey organizations or automated call services to poll their customers. These are efficient services to use, but not necessary for small- to medium-sized providers. Customer satisfaction can easily be conducted by simple means, whether via paper or telephone.