The OHA has seen strong uptake of the recommended patient experience measurement solution, the Qualtrics XM Platform. Recognizing that onboarding is not turn-key, the OHA anticipates that hospitals will experience a waiting period during which they are encouraged to focus efforts on internal readiness to initiate surveying once their Qualtrics XM license has been configured.
The OHA has developed a set of resources to support hospital patient experience leads and implementation teams in their efforts to plan for the implementation of the Qualtrics XM Platform. Informed by feedback and experiences shared by early adopter hospitals, these resources provide a shared understanding of key hospital decision points and greater clarity about what hospitals can anticipate once contracts have been executed. Kindly note that members are required to log in to view the resources below.
Understanding the Implementation Phase
The OHA has developed a comprehensive implementation phase overview guide that walks hospitals through what they can anticipate during the implementation phase including key steps such as Qualtrics XM license activation, providing the implementation support partner with access to the hospital's license, communicating the hospital's implementation requirements, identifying the scope of custom work, and participating in end-to-end testing. The guide highlights key decision points for hospitals, roles and responsibilities, and considerations to maximize internal readiness (e.g., staff training around the processes to email and consent collection, communicating the changes to how patient feedback is collected) to initiate patient experience surveying.
The Customizable Settings Guide (updated June 2023) highlights opportunities for hospitals to customize and modify default settings, such as administrative settings and content templates. Hospitals can customize their set up with the support of the implementation partner for an additional cost or, following implementation and with some modest learning, adopt a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach.
Building Hospital Capacity During the Implementation Phase
A learning curve is anticipated as hospitals take time to foster institutional knowledge and build proficiency in Qualtrics XM. The OHA highly encourages hospital staff who intend to be end-users of the Qualtrics XM platform to leverage the four-to-six-week implementation window to invest in capacity-building efforts. Hospitals will receive a curated list of pre-training materials in their welcome package from the implementation support partner. These materials, available through the Qualtrics website, provide a general foundation of the platform's basic functionality. To further support hospitals with using the Qualtrics XM platform for patient experience measurement, the implementation support partner has also developed a series of training videos that walk learners through performing some common tasks (e.g., adding questions).
April 18 2023 Webinar: Implementation Phase Overview
On April 18, 2023, the OHA held a webinar providing hospitals with a brief update and an overview of the implementation phase, from contract execution to configuration, that was led by Qualtrics and their implementation support partner SOM. Members also heard from an early adopter hospital about their initial impressions of the new platform. View the webinar, slide deck and summary of the Q&A (login required).
QR Code Guidance
The QR code survey mode can support hospitals who may be early in their journey to establish the appropriate infrastructure for collecting patient email, cellphone numbers (for SMS) and patient consent in their electronic medical records (EMRs). The OHA has developed administrative guidelines to support hospitals that plan to distribute standardized, pre-programmed surveys through the QR code mode and participate in benchmarking.
Supplementary Implementation Resources
- Implementation Checklist Form: This form, developed by Implementation Support Partner, SOM, captures a hospital's standard implementation requirements to support the configuration of its Qualtrics XM license. Hospitals will receive the Form in their welcome package from the implementation support partner. The OHA is sharing a Word version to support hospital planning efforts.
- Survey Availability: This document lists the standardized surveys the OHA has pre-programmed in Qualtrics XM including the survey modes available.
- Default Settings for the Administration of Standardized Surveys in the Qualtrics XM Platform: The OHA has prepared a summary of the default administrative settings (i.e., survey quarantine rules, frequency of surveying) that will be applied across hospital Qualtrics XM licenses.
- Data Specifications (Updated as of April 2025): The OHA has published data specifications outlining the required data fields and format hospitals must follow to successfully distribute care experience surveys via email or SMS using Qualtrics XM. The latest version (2.3) includes new data fields to support the distribution of the Care Satisfaction in the Intensive Care Unit (CS-ICU) survey and includes updates to the two fields (VisitType and ServiceIndicator) to support the distribution of the new short-form surveys launched in 2025.
- Privacy Settings Guide: To assist hospitals that are concerned about sensitive data flowing to third-party processors outside Canada (identified in the Privacy Impact Assessment), the OHA has developed this guide that recommends tools available within Qualtrics to flag and redact sensitive information from patient responses to open-ended questions. The recommended settings as specified in the guide, will be configured by the implementation support provider during hospital onboarding. An updated version of this guide was released in March 2023 to include the Sensitive Data Policy and default list of redaction items.
- Response Rates Guidance: The OHA has calculated response rates for patient experience surveys distributed via email by leveraging historical data from 2017 to 2022 to help hospitals understand anticipated survey volumes, identify the most appropriate Qualtrics licensing tier – and beyond implementation, inform sample size creation to meet hospital needs.
Current Learnings from Hospitals in Implementation
Based on the experiences of hospitals currently undergoing implementation (January to March 2023), the OHA has gained insights into implementation preferences and a better understanding of areas of uniformity, differences by region or hospital type, and unique contexts as hospitals onboard to the PEM solution; these insights include:
- a preference for short-form surveys in clinical areas, where available
- a range of 1 to 8 survey implementations
- selection of the Qualtrics File Server (QFS) to support the automated import configuration
- a weekly cadence to generate patient list files
