FeedbackNow today announced the release of the Q3 2026 FeedbackNow Hospital Index, the third edition of its quarterly benchmarking report designed to help hospitals better understand patient experience performance across key operational and care environments.
The latest Index brings encouraging news for healthcare organizations: overall patient satisfaction continued to improve in Q3, with notable gains across several clinical environments.
With three quarters of data now available, the FeedbackNow Hospital Index continues to provide healthcare leaders with a clearer view of how different hospital environments are performing and how patient experience is changing over time.
The Q3 findings point to positive movement across several areas of the patient journey, while also highlighting opportunities for hospitals to build greater consistency across departments, facilities, and operational touchpoints.
The Q3 2026 Hospital Index identified several emerging trends:
- Overall patient satisfaction improved quarter over quarter.
- Diagnostics & Imaging and Specialty Clinics recorded notable gains.
- Emergency Departments showed modest improvement while continuing to represent an important opportunity for operational focus.
- Clinical care environments continued to demonstrate strong satisfaction levels.
- Waiting areas and support services highlighted opportunities to improve consistency across the patient journey.
- Large hospitals recorded improvement as performance continued to evolve across hospital sizes.
- Regional performance differences remained evident, with varying trends across geographic markets.
- Operational touchpoints across the patient journey continued to play an important role in overall patient perception.
The Q3 Index draws on more than 164,000 patient responses, providing an evolving view of patient experience across participating hospital environments.
As the benchmark develops, the Index is designed to help healthcare leaders responsible for patient experience, Environmental Services (EVS), nursing operations, facilities management, and clinical support services better understand where improvements are taking hold and where additional operational focus may have the greatest impact.
The report examines performance across key hospital environments and explores:
- Which hospital environments improved most from Q2
- Where opportunities for further patient experience improvement remain
- How performance is changing by hospital size
- Differences in satisfaction across geographic regions
- Which operational touchpoints may deserve greater attention
- What quarter-over-quarter trends reveal about consistency and responsiveness across the patient journey
One of the key themes emerging from Q3 is the continued importance of consistency across the entire patient experience.
Patients experience a hospital as a connected journey — from arrival and waiting through clinical care, procedures, support services, and discharge. As overall satisfaction improves, the opportunity for healthcare organizations is to ensure those gains extend across as many patient touchpoints as possible.
The Hospital Index is intended to support healthcare organizations building operational improvement plans tied to:
- HCAHPS performance
- Patient satisfaction initiatives
- EVS and cleanliness programs
- Service recovery strategies
- Operational responsiveness
- Frontline engagement and accountability
The FeedbackNow Hospital Index will continue to be published quarterly, providing an evolving benchmark of patient experience performance and operational trends across participating healthcare organizations and hospital systems.
Download the Q3 2026 FeedbackNow Hospital Index to explore the complete findings, benchmarks, and quarter-over-quarter trends.
About FeedbackNow
FeedbackNow helps organizations improve operational performance and customer experience through real-time feedback and insight. In today’s environment, customers, patients, and loyalty are won — or lost — in real time.
FeedbackNow enables healthcare organizations, airports, retailers, transportation providers, and other high-traffic environments to capture live feedback, identify operational friction quickly, and empower frontline teams to respond faster. By turning real-time insight into immediate action, FeedbackNow helps organizations improve satisfaction, strengthen loyalty, and create more connected experiences.
Contact us to learn more about how FeedbackNow can help improve your customer experience and operations!
