Integrate Care Opinion with other feedback workflows

At Care Opinion we work with hundreds of organisations. And you won't be surprised to hear that most organisations have many different ways to hear feedback from people.

For example, some teams or departments might have an online survey for patients to complete. Some might invite feedback using NHS England's "friends and family test" question, perhaps by text message (SMS) or by email. Some services might even be running an online consultation about a proposed service development.

Inevitably, working with different approaches can sometimes lead to duplication, extra work, or confusion for staff and patients. Fortunately, we've recently added a new feature to Care Opinion which we hope will help.

Invitation links

Last year we added "campaign links" to Care Opinion. Recently we renamed this feature to "invitation links" and we've been adding some extra superpowers to make them even more useful.

Two very important superpowers you can now give to your invitation links are:

• automatic tagging of new stories
• inviting people to give additional feedback through your own system, after they tell a story on Care Opinion

Let's see how you can use these features to create flexible "hybrid workflows" which integrate Care Opinion with other feedback methods you already use.

Hybrid workflows

The idea of a hybrid workflow is that you join together different methods of gathering feedback, to make it simpler and easier for both patients and staff.

For example:

1. Invite patients to complete your online survey after their care. At the end, direct them to Care Opinion if they wish to give more specific feedback. (Surrey & Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust has used this method very successfully.)
2. Maybe you already send a series of SMS messages (texts) to gather FFT responses in England. Add a link to Care Opinion to the final message, for people who have more to say. (United Lincs Hospitals NHS Trust has used this approach for some years.)
3. Perhaps you'd like patients/carers to share their story on Care Opinion, and then give further views via your online survey or an online consultation. Invitation links now make this possible.

A provider-first workflow

Let's call the first two examples above "provider-first" because they start with your own existing approach, and then at the end they offer a link to Care Opinion, like this:

This is easy to do. Just provide a link to Care Opinion for people to follow if they wish.

But we can do better. What if you want to know which of your Care Opinion stories come via your online survey? In that case, instead of providing a simple link to Care Opinion, provide an invitation link.

That way you can find all stories told using that specific link. You can pre-suggest a service so stories get to the right place (and the right staff!). And you can have specific tags added automatically to stories so you can find and group them in various ways.

A Care Opinion-first workflow

Or you can do things the other way round, and invite stories through Care Opinion first. Here's how that looks at the moment:

That's right - until now, if you start with Care Opinion there isn't any way to direct people onwards after they tell their story. Not good!

To fix this, we recently introduced "invite additional feedback" as an extra superpower for invitation links. Once you add this to your invitation link, your workflow can look like this:

After people use your superpowered invitation link to share a story, we invite them to give additional feedback. We show them your invitation and we link them to your survey or consultation tool, which they can then complete if they wish.

How to do this

Setting this up is very easy. Just open up your invitation link page and open the panel headed "Invite additional feedback". Then enter your invitation text and your invitation link (the address of your survey or other feedback tool):

Then save your changes. Your link summary might be something like this:

How does it appear to story authors?

After a story author submits their story, we'll show your invitation. Here's an example of how it might look:

The future is hybrid

 In this post we've looked at two ways you could create hybrid workflows. You can start from your own system and direct onwards to Care Opinion, or start with Care Opinion and direct back to your own system.

Either way, it is easy to set up, convenient for patients, and allows you to mix and match collecting your own survey data with using Care Opinion's powerful, moderated, public conversations with just the right staff across your services. The best of both worlds!

If you have any questions about any of this, or need any help, do get in touch.