As healthcare organizations adopt a value-based care model and treat patients as customers, they can learn from precedents in other industries.
Healthcare organizations currently have data containing a wealth of information that can be used to personalize experiences and improve care delivery. Additionally, patient expectations are changing dramatically due to the pandemic, access to technology, and generational preferences.
By actively listening to patients, identifying experience gaps, and understanding how expectations differ across market segments and patient groups, you can tailor engagement to individuals and ensure positive outcomes. We found these to be best practices for translating between customer experience and patient experience.
Activate your existing data and unlock hidden insights
Organizations that are truly customer- or patient-centric innovations know that simply monitoring or understanding patient preferences is not enough.
Organizations outside of healthcare excel by leveraging existing data to segment customers and reallocate resources to improve service. Borrowing a concept from customer experience, journey maps allow you to understand the experience through the eyes of the customer. You need to know what the customer wants to accomplish and ask yourself, “How do we meet that need now and who do we want to be?”
Choose your area of focus and outline all the checkpoints that the patient felt had an impact, then chart your experience and segment data. Once you understand your current state, you can work toward your ideal future state to see where you are overinvesting and improving the areas that matter most to your patients.
Consider the patient experience holistically
It’s easy to think of the patient experience as merely the experience of a patient receiving care in a hospital bed, but it’s much more than that.
This extends to patients at appointments, en route, considering parking locations, waiting rooms, transferring from one unit to another, waiting for test results, and even when patients leave the hospital or doctor’s office and the follow-up they receive.
A positive experience depends on many other factors, small moments, and stakeholders beyond the doctor or nurse at the bedside. Involving the patient before, during, and after the meeting is key to understanding what the patient is going through, so you can adjust your processes and communications.
Savvy organizations know that patients form opinions and build trust even before they meet. Some organizations utilize software to understand patient feedback on first impressions, care transitions, and discharge communications, so they can perform service recovery and resolve issues before patients leave. This communication can improve the experience and prevent unintended negative comments from appearing in reviews or post-discharge surveys.
Sending out post-discharge surveys immediately can help providers fill in the gaps that traditional surveys miss by asking not only questions related to your plan, but also questions related to a patient’s demographics and care journey. This can include provider-specific feedback, patient-reported outcomes, and care reminder communications to improve adherence to medication and home care.
Personalized engagement at the right time is an opportunity for healthcare organizations to build loyalty, reduce churn and impact bottom line.
Strive to understand the “why behind what” to focus time and resources
Flexible tools give you a deeper understanding of what actually affects the experience, revealing the “why behind the why”.
As a result, organizations often receive good or bad survey scores without a clear understanding of why. It’s important to understand how these relate to supplier or operational improvements. Reports that include correlation analysis help organizations understand what levers can be leveraged to influence change.
With flexible tools that can unearth areas of interest, organizations often discover simple opportunities they hadn’t considered before.
Stay agile with real-time data to assess change
The patient experience in the hospital has objectively changed since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. For example, stricter visitation policies mean fewer loved ones are able to enter wards to provide support and hear care plans or discharge instructions.
It is important to involve patients to ensure they are comfortable at discharge and provide opportunities for other issues. Patient expectations for safety, technology and communication have changed since the start of the pandemic, meaning that processes and operational workflows for care teams must also change.
Real-time engagement can help track and reveal how patients are feeling about these changes and identify additional gaps and opportunities. The pandemic has highlighted the need for successful organizations across industries to remain agile and more focused than ever before prioritizing the voice of their customers.
Photo: designer491, Getty Images
