In the coming months, Military health system patients will notice a change to the post-appointment satisfaction surveys they receive after a trip to the doctor.

Fewer surveys, a new design and less hassle are being rolled out in coming months, promises Defense Health Agency Director Vice Adm. Raquel Bono.

A new system, the Joint Outpatient Experience Survey, or JOES, is replacing the surveys once conducted by the individual services' medical commands.

Patients no longer will get one or more surveys following every visit. Instead, they are likely to receive one survey per three-month period that asks questions about on one specific appointment.

The goals are to streamline the process, to make it easier for the Defense Health Agency to track responses and to encourage patients to return the form, according to Bono.

"It was, oftentimes, confusing because you'd have an Army patient who would go to an Air Force facility and they'd get two surveys. We wanted to make sure we were not overburdening our patients," Bono said during an interview earlier this month.

JOES will allows DHA to standardizes the questions, collect the information and assess it.

Previously, each medical command issued its their own individual surveys. But without a set of standard questions and a central holding place for the information, it was difficult to compare the quality of health care across the services, according to Bono said.

"Everybody was trying to get the same information … but when you have so many different variations, even if they are minor, when you try to get the information in aggregate manner, you can't retrieve it easily," Bono said.

The new one-page, double-sided survey asks about the care received at a specific appointment. It asks questions about the provider's thoroughness, how the appointment was made, whether the patient had difficulties making an appointment and what the patient's experience was like.

Defense officials said they hope that with fewer surveys, patients will take the time to complete them. Bono added that JOES provides an opportunity for patients to influence the quality of military medicine.

"This very easily allows us to look at ourselves more expansively, to see how we are doing as an enterprise, instead of the Army says this, the Navy says this and the Air Force says this," Bono said.

Defense officials could not say what the response rate is to of the current patient satisfaction surveys, noting that they would have to go to each of the medical commands to get the answer to that question.

They said the consolidation of the survey system will allow such information to be readily accessible, rather than having to retrieve it from each service.

All Navy hospitals and the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, began using JOES in mid-May. The Army was set to begin fielding JOES in mid-June and the Air Force is expected to roll it out in September.

Patricia Kime covers military and veterans health care and medicine for Military Times. She can be reached at pkime@militarytimes.com.

About Patricia Kime

Patricia Kime is a senior writer covering military and veterans health care, medicine and personnel issues.

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