Your hospital’s million dollar lobby.  The business process pictured below is the one called WAITING.  Is that coffee I smell?  Arrive at 6 AM for surgery.  Sit with the other people who arrived at 6 AM.  Why couldn’t these people have used their iPads to have admitted themselves online the night before?  What is the level of satisfaction for patients, friends and family members, and prospective patients?  By the way, why is the woman in the back row smiling?

Your hospital’s WEBSITE lobby—Where is Waldo?

You came to the site to decide if you were going to seek a second opinion from another hospital.  You spend 7-10 seconds deciding if you have come to a site that can help you.  Do you stay and hunt, or do you try another website?  See if you can find the arrow to help you get what you need about getting a second opinion.  You could not find the link because it is not there.  It is not there on 99% of hospital websites, yet fifty percent of people go to your hospital website looking for it.

If 99% of the people who visit your website are either patients or prospective patients, why do you have all of the other links on your homepage?  If all of these things are so important to a visitor, why then does your hospital lobby not have all of these signs confronting visitors the moment they walk in the front door?

Did the website deliver a remarkable experience for every patient every time on every device?  Didn’t think so either.

Your hospital’s call center ‘lobby’. How good was this experience?  Will they ever call again?  Did they call outside of 8-5 Monday through Friday?  Did they get the same answer as the last person who called with the same question?  Was the answer correct?  Was their call transferred to someone else?  Do they have to call back?

While I hate to always be the one belaboring the obvious, here it comes.  Clearly bad experiences for patients and prospective patients happen many different ways.  None of these bad experience were caused by any cranky staff members, so you do not need to hire a firm to coach nurse Ratched.  (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “If Mr. McMurphy doesn’t want to take his medication orally, I’m sure we can arrange that he can have it some other way. But I don’t think that he would like it”.)

None of these bad experiences were the result of the bathrooms being 3.2% less clean than the standard deviation from the mean norm of optimal—I don’t know what that means either.  What it does mean though is buying data some firm about how people viewed your organization will not improve any of the bad experiences depicted above.

Mobile. On the web. On the phone.  In the hospital.

A remarkable experience every time for every person on every device.