What can healthcare providers do to improve patient experience?

 

Introduction 

In the digital age, healthcare businesses often make the mistake of thinking that patient experience is only improved through adopting newer technologies. With healthcare businesses finally realizing the importance of patient experience improvement on their business as a whole, they have slowly begun to work upon improving the patient’s journey. 

This is a marked shift of attitude in the healthcare industry. Many healthcare providers take pride in their work, deservedly so. But often their pride comes from the technical aspects of care that they are providing, often unintentionally forgetting about the personal aspects of care that are equally as important. 

With a renewed focus on improving patient experiences, healthcare organizations have begun to leverage the technological advances that have been made over the past years to offer better patient experiences. But while leveraging tech can offer markedly improved patient experiences, there is more that healthcare providers can do to improve patient experiences. 

 Patient Experience 

One of the most important things for healthcare providers and healthcare businesses to recognize is that patient experience and patient satisfaction while similar in the definition are measuring essentially different things. Healthcare businesses today have plenty of tools to measure patient satisfaction with the proliferation and utilization of surveys like HCAHPS. Patient satisfaction is the extent to which patients are happy with the services provided by a healthcare facility. 

Patient experience, on the other hand, is the total sum of all the feelings, thoughts, and interactions that a patient experiences in their healthcare journey. In essence, the patient experience is the perspective of the patient in the care journey and patient satisfaction is how happy they are with the care that they received. 

In order to raise patient satisfaction, healthcare organizations need to focus on patient experience improvement. 

With only 30 percent of Americans being satisfied with the national health system, there remains plenty of room for improvement. These improvements can often happen when patients are interacting with healthcare providers, nursing staff, and other staff at healthcare facilities. These human interactions can have a huge impact on patient experience, often to a much larger extent than what healthcare businesses imagine. 

 Role of Healthcare providers 

Technological advances especially towards digitized healthcare have been brought about as a result of healthcare organizations needing to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic. These changes have ushered in a new revolution in improving patient experiences by integrating advanced technology like data analysis, machine learning, predictive modeling, and others to improve patient experiences especially large institutional healthcare businesses. 

But in the face of these advances, the human element of patient care is often being ignored. The key thought in every strategy behind improving patient experience is to turn healthcare into being more patient-centric. 

“In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort” - Abraham Verghese, MD

 

Patient experience can be said to be broadly divided into two large categories. The first is the technical aspect of healthcare where a patient’s treatment, diagnosis, and other aspects that are directly related to treating the patient. But the second and equally as important aspect, that is often forgotten, is the human element or the customer-service element of healthcare. Factors like cost, convenience, time, effort, comfort are some of the factors that make up the customer-service elements of the patient experience. 

Healthcare providers pride themselves on their skills in the technical aspects of healthcare and their professionalism. Being better in the technical aspects of healthcare results in better healthcare outcomes, which obviously do factor into patient satisfaction and experience. 

But how a patient feels is also important to understand their perspective and improve it. It is for this reason that the customer service aspect of healthcare is also important. 

Think of it as the difference between taking a flight with Spirit Airlines from Chicago to Miami and then taking the same trip with United Airlines. The quality of customer service elevates or deprecates, the quality of the actual product or service being paid for. 

“They may forget your name, but they will never forget how you made them feel” - Maya Angelou

What can healthcare providers do? 

Now understanding the importance of customer service in healthcare, healthcare providers may wonder what exactly they can do to improve customer service for their patients. After all are not doctors, nurses and other staff there to provide treatment to the patient? Does it not make more sense for healthcare businesses to hire dedicated customer service agents to improve patient experiences? 

Well, not exactly. 

A healthcare business, if large enough and if necessary, can indeed hire customer service agents to improve the patient experience. Though what the customer service agents do is not even a fraction of the impact of healthcare providers and nurses on patient experiences.

Healthcare providers can focus on strategies that work on certain aspects of healthcare to improve the patient experience. 

Some of the patient experience best practices are:

 

• Improving patient access to information about their care          
• Bettering communication channels with patients
• Coordinating the different disparate departments in a healthcare organization for optimized care
• Improved ancillary customer service
• Promotion of health education

The BraveLab blog will take a further detailed look into how to implement these strategies into your healthcare business in a later blog. 

Conclusion 

 Patient experience improvement is not a process that happens from just one part of a healthcare organization. All stakeholders in the healthcare organization, from the CEO to the janitor, are responsible for making sure that patients not only get the best quality of treatment but also the best customer service possible. 

BraveLabs enables healthcare businesses of all kinds and sizes to improve their patient experiences through tools like patient journey management, medical content, and more.