I dropped by the Minute Clinic for my flu shot. The forty-something woman ahead of me, whose purse was the size of a small Winnebago, stepped up to the kiosk to sign in. I may have mentioned in a prior post that I was at the back of the line when God was handing out patience. After five minutes I began to get a little exasperated. Her ability to interface with technology reminded me of a chimp learning to play the bagpipes. Knowing she was going to be a while I retreated to the shaving aisle, grabbed a can of shave cream, a razor, and cleaned myself up a bit.
While the Minute Clinic may be a Godsend for parents in terms of convenience, cost, and immediacy, the user experience (UX) could be improved. What user experience? The one that has to do with their automated sign-in. The user interface (UI), although childlike in its simplicity takes more time to complete than the exam. Your hospital’s website is probably chocked-full of UX and UI opportunities.
Moving on.
Observation may be one of our best teachers, but by failing to observe what we see every day, what is commonplace, we often miss what can be learned from it. Here is a real-life example that occurred to me from having watched a human interest story on the local news about neighbors banding together to try and rescue someone’s pet cat that was stuck in a tree.
Ladders. Catnip. Clawed rescuers. The cat eventually came down of its own accord.
Here is the observation; have you ever seen a cat skeleton in a tree? What can be learned? Maybe cats do not need rescuing.
Innovating patient experience has many similarities with cats stuck in trees. Somebody overthinks the problem, regulates it, and we throw resources at the problem trying to avoid the regulators. We establish committees, have meetings, and create reports. We discuss the problem, we recall what happened the last time we had this type of problem, we bring in experts whose skills are particularly attuned to solving this problem, and then we attack it.
The one thing we fail to do is to validate whether the problem as defined by Washington, and the solution, as defined by Washington—raising the scores of thirty-two questions—is the right approach. This approach presupposes that higher scores are reflective of higher patient experience. Is it possible that higher scores are simply reflective of having figured out how to avoid CMS’s penalty?
Thirty-two. A very precise number. Thirty-one questions were not enough. Thirty-three would have been one too many. Thirty-two questions was just right—sounds a little like Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Those thirty-two questions do not address anything the patient may experience before coming to the hospitals or after leaving the hospital. They do not address what type of experience prospective patients, people who want to buy healthcare, have when they call the hospital or look online for information about the hospital.
This link takes you to a brief deck listing questions about someone’s experience that were not asked by CMS. The answers to these questions affect whether someone will buy healthcare from your organization, whether they will buy it again when they require additional care, and whether they will refer your organization to others.
http://www.slideshare.net/paulroemer/step-aside-hcahps
I have done the math. The financial benefits of getting favorable answers to these questions far exceeds the financial penalty imposed by CMS. The best you can do by scoring well on CMS’s questions is to avoid a penalty. The best you can do by scoring well on my questions is to add revenues.
You decide how you want to play it. Meanwhile, the cat in the tree is doing just fine and does not require any help. If it does, there is always gravity.
Pale Rhino Consulting 
Paul, your slideshare and article are most interesting. And, in some ways …maybe many ways, the paradigm of “patient acquisition” is not far from the customer model that is so insulting to someone first victim to their condition and, second, so unable to control what is going on around them. The patient experience is constructed using events that somehow matter to a patient, not those that we may jodge as important. Further, expectations, perceptions, reflection, and context bring meaning to the hospitalization during and, more, following the health crisis. Until the system is shifted to one authentically caring about what matters, until there is palpable parity between the patient and the provider, an adversarialy stand is imminent on both side of the relationship. So, I would suggest, taking your question about HCAHPS, that rather than ask what kind of report card we take home, the larger question is whether we learned anything at all.
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Susan, thank you for reading and for the insightful comments.
A connection of mine on LinkedIn who is undergoing chemotherapy at Baltimore’s top hospital wrote to tell me that between treatments she called the hospital to schedule an appointment. Between being on hold, having her call transferred, and being given different numbers to call it took three hours for her to schedule the appointment.
Because the hospital failed to perform a simple business process over the phone she told me she will make it her life’s mission to tell people, whatever their illness, to get treatment at another hospital. The hospital will not retain her beyond this illness. A loss of retention and referrals. They cannot put the toothpaste back into the tube. The direct cost of the call to the hospital—thirty dollars. The cost in lost revenues to the hospital for not being able to deliver the expected level of satisfaction will probably be six figures.
There is no universal patient experience solution. HCAHPs is doing good, but hospitals were addressing those issues prior to CMS imposing their strictures. From where I sit HCAHPs does not pass the test of being both necessary and sufficient.
I am trying to raise the discussion to suggest that patient experience is more than HCAHPs. If we look up ‘patient experience’ in the dictionary it should say something other than HCAHPs. I use the Total Quality of a person’s Encounter (TQE). I use person instead of patient because the largest group of stakeholders who have experiences with a hospital are prospective patients, those who ‘visit’ the hospital online and by phone.
I define TQE as follows:
TQE = HCAHPs + all of the nonclinical touchpoints
The nonclinical touchpoints begin before a person is admitted, they begin when people are selecting a healthcare provider, and they continue after discharge.
Most people limit the impact of the Affordable Care Act to payers. Yes, people will be able to choose their payers. Hospitals need to recognize that many people will choose their payers based upon the hospital where they elect to be treated.
Today hospitals cannot even track leakage, let alone figure out how to curb it. Under the ACA people will be issuing virtual RFPs for healthcare, and if their experience on the phone or on a hospital’s website is not remarkable that hospital will be out of the running before if ever knew it was being considered.
I believe that within three years the best hospitals—those that offer a remarkable experience every time on every device—will be those that a person can carry that hospital’s functionality around on their iPad, just like they can carry around the functionality of Amazon today.
People feel they are paying a hospital for two things:
• Outstanding care
• Ease of doing business with the hospital
While outstanding care is valued higher than whether the hospital can answer their phones, if they cannot answer their phones they may not be given the opportunity to showcase their care.
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thanks John
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Paul, great stuff indeed. I would love to add some of the questions in the slide to our question bank with your permission?
We are in the second month using our tablet based Solution collecting Patient Experience Data at point of care and I am happy to report overall a 92% return rate. This is in the LTACH environment with 15 locations using a survey they have designed to meet the needs of the LTAC patient. I chose to start with the LTACH industry because they are not handcuffed by the HCAHPS/CMS mandates and are free to collect patient experience data in the manner technology in this day and age allows. It has been refreshing and exciting to our clients.
We begin round table discussions with a group of LTACH professionals next week that will determine our LTACH Survey for 2014.
Keep up the great work Paul, eventually Washington will stop trying to rescue the damn cat!
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go for it Wayne
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