Who is responsible for patient satisfaction?  The flaw of averages suggests that the buck does not stop somewhere.

Your amygdala’s been hijacked.

The bad thing about being a former mathematician in my case is that the emphasis is on the word former. Sometimes I’m convinced I’ve forgotten more than I ever learned—sort of like the concept of negative numbers. It’s funny how the mind works, or in my case goes on little vacations without telling me. This whole parabola thing came to me while I was running, and over the next few miles of my run I tried to reconstruct the formula for a parabola. No luck.

My mind shut that down and went off on something that at least sounded somewhat similar, parables. That got me to thinking, and all of a sudden I was focused on the parable of the lost sheep, the one where a sheep wanders off and the shepherd leaves his flock to go find the lost one, which brings us to where we are today.

Sheep and effort.  Let’s rewind for a second. Permit me to put the patient lifecycle into physics for librarian style language—get the patient, treat the patient, lose the patient.  These are the three basic boxes where providers focus resources. How do manage the patient lifecycle to our advantage? We have marketing and sales to get the patient, we have patient care to treat the patient.  Can anyone tell me the name of the group whose job it is to lose the patient?  Sorry, I should have said to not lose the patient.

Patient retention.  Can anyone in your hospital tell me what specific efforts are underway to get patients to return the next time they need care?  I hope it involves more than the marketing department erecting another billboard with a picture of the urologists.

Where do most providers spend the majority of their intellectual capital and investment dollars? Hint—watch their commercials. It’s to get the patient. Out comes the red carpet. They get escorted in with the white glove treatment. Once they’re in, the gloves come off, to everyone’s detriment. Nobody ever sees the red carpet again. A high percentage of a hospital’s marketing budget is to get the patients. Almost nothing is spent to retain exiting patients.

Existing patients versus exiting patients. Why patients lose patience. 

Winning hospitals roll out the red carpet when patients exit. They do this for two reasons. One, it may cause a patient to return. Two, it changes the conversation. Which conversation? The one your patient is about to have with the rest of the world. How does your hospital want that conversation to go?

What do you have to do to get the patient to come back the next time he needs treatment? What the next visit of a patient worth to your hospital?  What about the next five visits? There seem to be a lot of questions for which answers seem to be missing.