Learnings from elective healthcare for improving patient experiences

Patient experiences are one of the key factors for the success of healthcare businesses in providing satisfaction to their customers. Through improving patient experiences in the lessons learned from areas of medicine like elective healthcare, healthcare businesses can drive growth and better outcomes.

Introduction

Healthcare organizations are constantly looking for ways to grow and improve their business. For the healthcare industry, this can often be mistaken for the number of successful outcomes that a healthcare organization is able to achieve. But successful outcomes are not the only way that a healthcare organization should be measuring its success, however.

Patient experience, which drives patient satisfaction, is also an important indicator of the quality of care and service being provided by a healthcare organization. It is the reason why surveys like the HCAHPS Score are used as indicators by the government and third-party payers to measure patient satisfaction in healthcare settings.

To improve patient satisfaction, it is necessary to improve patient experiences. Though this realization has come to the healthcare industry for a few years at this point, progress in healthcare fields like elective healthcare.

Patient Experience

Patient experience is the entirety of the experience of a patient in their healthcare journey. It can also be defined as the amalgamation of all their interactions with a healthcare provider or facility during their healthcare journey. Patient experience is what determines the satisfaction of a patient during a healthcare journey. The simplest definition is that the patient experience is how a patient feels at the end of the care journey.

While simplistic, this definition allows healthcare businesses to understand what exactly patient experience is aiming to measure. Research over the past decade has underlined the various benefits that increasing patient experiences can have not just for patients but for the healthcare providers themselves.

Patient experience best practices include measures like improving engagement with patients, promoting prevention, improving communication, and creating patient-focused systems. Progress on these methods can be hard to measure without the appropriate tools in many healthcare settings.

This line of thinking is indicative of the fact that healthcare is quickly realizing that it is a service-oriented industry. Patients have a plethora of service providers to choose from, and healthcare providers who are not actively enhancing patient experiences are going to be losing out to their competition. Patients want to be treated like customers, and not just passive patients.

“When you think about ‘patient satisfaction, your mind may automatically go to the superficial: making patients happy and being nice. ‘Patient experience is the totality of the experience. The clinical, operational, cultural, and behavioral – everything that happens to, about, and with the person who happens to be a patient.” ~ Christy Dempsey, Chief Nursing Officer of Press Ganey Associates

Improving patient experiences

So while patient experience improvement is extremely important, how can healthcare providers actually improve their patients’ satisfaction? The answer is through a holistic multi-pronged approach that keeps the patients’ needs and wants at the center. Many of these multi-pronged approaches have been seen in the field of elective healthcare.

Elective healthcare simply refers to those medical and surgical procedures that are booked well in advance as they typically do not constitute a medical emergency. However, elective also doesn’t mean that these surgeries are not necessary. While most popular elective procedures like LASIK and cosmetic procedures are not ‘necessary’, there are other elective procedures that are important for the health of the patient.

Since patients have to choose to undergo elective procedures, the way that healthcare organizations often frame elective procedures is much different than other procedures. This is why the patient experience for elective healthcare is known to be better than in many other fields of healthcare.

Here are some of the ways that healthcare businesses can improve patient experiences that have been learned from elective healthcare:

Engagement-Engagement with the patient should begin even before the start of the care journey in many cases. Outreach programs and educational campaigns for preventive care and early diagnosing methods are one example of such methods. Additionally, engagement with patients should also be extended to their caregivers and families by reaching out to them. Engagement often forms the basis of trust and loyalty that patients came to build with a healthcare organization.

Journey Optimization-Healthcare journeys can often be anxiety-inducing for most, and very few individuals would be happy to be inside a healthcare facility. Elective procedures realize this and often take painstaking care to ensure that patients are comfortable within facilities.

It is for these reasons that healthcare professionals should try to ensure that the healthcare journey is quick, convenient, and comfortable for their patients. Reducing waiting times, introducing calming colors, using patient-friendly technology are some of the measures that can be taken.

Aligning goals and expectations-Patients have an idea of what their healthcare journey will result in. If this idea is different than their provider, then this should be cleared out by the provider. By setting outpatient goals, expectations, and even anxieties on the table at the very forefront, healthcare professionals can align treatments with what the outcomes that the patient desires.

The alignment of goals and expectations leads to patients being happier with their outcomes and their overall experiences.

Conclusion

Improving patient experiences in a healthcare setting is the most important goal for healthcare businesses. It is an indicator of the quality of care and service provided by a healthcare organization, and an essential part of retaining and adding new patients.

BraveLabs is aiding healthcare organizations to improve their patient experiences and grow with services like patient journey management and more.

 


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