best hospitals

Patient Satisfaction: A Normal Experience Will Never Be Amazing

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Are Hospital Executives Ignoring Their Own Survey Results?

I was reading the survey results of ache.org’s 2012 “Top Issues Confronting Hospitals: 2012”. Two things jumped out at me. Improving Patient Satisfaction was in essentially a statistical tie with two other issues for third place.

Second, Decreasing Inpatient Volume was essentially in a statistical tie for third place for financial challenges that need to be addressed.

Ache.org only reported the results. It did not draw any conclusions. It seems there is little point in surveying people unless someone acts upon the results–I may have made the same point before regarding HCAHPs.

That said, I will offer a conclusion, one that can be derived without studying the numbers.  I bet there is close to a one-to-one relationship between Patient Satisfaction and the decrease of inpatient volumes.  Fix one, fix the other.

I like that the survey labeled the issue of patient ‘satisfaction’ instead of CMS’ patient ‘experience’.  Every patient, and every prospective patient has an experience with the hospital. However, not every experience is satisfactory, and normal experiences will never be amazing.

Why not have your goal be “A remarkable experience for every patient every time and on every device? If that doesn’t work you can always erect another billboard.

Patient Experience: Not understanding UX and UI is killing Patient Experience

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UI and UX seem to be two terms that have yet to make their way into healthcare. One way I like to think of the application of design thinking in hospitals is to compare the hospital’s lobby to its website.

Millions were spent to make the lobby user friendly, to create a remarkable first impression.  There is a receptionist and maybe a sign or two pointing to the ER or the Lab.

The website is a different matter–as is the call center.  The website’s homepage offers the ‘kitchen-sink’ to visitors, patients and prospective patients. Dozens of links, Flash, every phone number you may ever need.  Users can learn about the board and make a donation. They can do everything except find the link they wanted. 

Ninety-nine percent of visitors are either patients, people trying to decide if they are going to seek a second opinion–from some hospital other than yours, or prospective patients trying to make a healthcare purchase decision. The average person spends seven seconds on a web page looking for what they want.

What that tells me is the average person is leaving the average hospital’s website unsatisfied and with a poor experience. Why is nobody interested in improving that experience?

Defining a global patient experience

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My presentation, according to Slideshare, “Defining a global patient experience for your health system”  is being talked about on Linkedln more than anything else on SlideShare…http://www.slideshare.net/paulroemer/defining-a-global-patient-experience-for-your-health-system

The Democratization of Patient Satisfaction

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So, how can you tell how the hospital’s patient experience improvement effort is progressing?  Perhaps this is one way to tell.

A man left his cat with his brother while he went on vacation for a week. When he came back, he called his brother to see when he could pick the cat up. The brother hesitated, and then said, “I’m so sorry, but while you were away, the cat died.”

The man was very upset and replied, “You know, you could have broken the news to me better than that. When I called today, you could have said the cat was on the roof and wouldn’t come down. Then when I called the next day, you could have said that he had fallen off and the vet was working on patching him up. Then when I called the third day, you could have said the cat had passed away.”

The brother thought about it and apologized.

“So how’s Mom?” asked the man.

“She’s on the roof and won’t come down.”

If you ask someone how the patient experience improvement effort is going and she responds by saying, “The project leader is on the roof and won’t come down,” it may be time to get a new leader.

There are more than 120,000 URLs returned when searching “’Why do patients choose’ hospital”.  Based on what I read, the URLs all take the reader to something written by the hospital.

Sixty percent of people say they use the internet to make a healthcare decision.  Sixteen percent of hospitals use social media.  Eighty-one percent of prospective patients stated that a hospital with a strong social media presence is likely to be more cutting edge—you do the math.

Whether your hospital has a strong social media presence may be less relevant because your prospective patients certainly do.  So what does that knowledge do to your organization’s patient experience strategy?   Do you double or triple you social media output?  Does your one or two person internet department try to out-social-media thousands of prospective patients, Twittering away, and constantly posting to Facebook?  Trying to catch up is like trying to walk across a room, and with each successive step cutting the remaining distance in half—you never get to the other side.

The social media “experts” would tell you that is exactly what you need to be doing—more is better.  I think the experts are wrong.

If the experts are wrong, what is the right approach?  The internet is a powerful touchpoint for both patients and prospective patients.  The internet is a large component of patient satisfaction, patient experience, and patient choice.

Rather than going wide and shallow with social media or social-CRM think about a narrower mobile digital strategy that goes deep. For example, think about your hospital’s website.  For starters, what you have is probably just that, just a website. 

There are dozens and dozens of reasons a patient or prospect would go to your site.  A high percentage of them go there because they do not want to try to accomplish something by dialing any of the hospital’s multiple phone numbers.  When they go to the website if it does not entice them to stay on the site, bookmark it, or make it their homepage, the website might as well not exist.

Your website is where purchasing decisions are made and lost by prospective patients, and where satisfaction is raised or lowered for patients.  If a patient cannot accomplish the task they set out to do in an intuitive and user-friendly way, their satisfaction with your entire organization just dropped.

Many more people go to your website than go through the front door of your hospital.  The good news is that you control the user experience of someone on your site.  The bad news is that most organizations are controlling it in a way that gives users a poor experience.  The list of things users cannot do on your website is much longer than the list of things they can do.

Having a tab that reads ‘schedule a visit’ is worth nothing unless the patient was able to schedule a visit, in fact, it probably kills satisfaction.  Having a tab that reads ‘get your health records’ that requires someone to download a PDF, print it, and mail it is equally bad for patient satisfaction.

What should your website be?  At a minimum it should be some combination of a patient portal and a knowledge management system.  It should also be your billing department, your scheduling department, admissions, discharge, housekeeping, food services, support groups, and education services.

Your website should offer every service your hospital offers with the possible exception of a hip replacement—a 24 by 7 virtual hospital minus patient care.  Two-way.  And mobile.  Available on any device at any time.

If you want to interact with your community, patients and non-patients, you need to go to where they are.  And where they are is online.  It is not good if someone with heart disease can watch an angiogram on YouTube or on a competitor’s website and on your website they cannot even find a meaningful cardiology link.  Online patient support groups at the best hospitals provide a real-time referral group—can your patients do that on your site or do they have to go to someone else’s?

Patients are democratizing information. If the information provided by your organization is asymmetrical, it has some catching up to do.

Patient satisfaction—a remarkable experience for every patient every time; in the hospital, on the web, and on the phone.

 

Patient Acquisition: Inverting the Sales Funnel

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The link below is to a presentation of mine on Slideshare about patient acquisition; how it is done and my thoughts on how it ought to be done.  In today’s world most hospitals spend a lot of money chasing people.  However, the people they are chasing are researching from which hospital they will purchase services.

If you know the cost to acquire a patient the traditional way please let me know.  The cost to  have a patient choose your facility is almost zero.

How to acquire patients on http://www.slideshare.net/paulroemer/how-to-acquire-patients-21677042

Please let me know what you think

 

 

Patient Satisfaction–The Mathematics of Change

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There are three people in the ER. One of them is a physician, one of them is an executive, and one of them is a consultant. They see a machine unplugged that is standing against a wall in the waiting room.

And the executive says, ‘Look, the technology in this hospital is not used.’ And the physician says, ‘No. There are machines in the hospital of which at least one is not used.’

And the consultant stood there in silence guessing neither of them really cared what he thought about the machine.

At least one. A mathematical term meaning one or more.

Some. A non mathematical term.

The term is commonly used in situations where existence can be established but it is not known how to determine the total number of solutions.  In our example, ‘E’ represents the unused machine and ‘C’ represents the unused consultant—the exceptionally bright among us will notice there is no ‘C’.  That is a problem on my end, but I digress.

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How many things can be changed regarding the patient experience that would have a positive impact? At least one.

What would you change if you were not afraid of failing?

 

What does it take to be the best hospital?

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Below is a reply I wrote to a question raised on Hospital Impact, “What does it take to be the best hospital on the planet?”

http://bit.ly/v4pr6

I’d like to hear what you think it would take.

Great question and one that needs to be asked with much regularity.  I target my comments at the healthcare business as opposed to the business of healthcare—the clinical part.

May I begin with a statement that may have many readers reaching for their delete keys?  As one who has consulted to many industries, to me the healthcare business appears to be stuck in a 0.2 business model and is being forced to rapidly reinvent itself in a 2.0 model—my use of the term 2.0 does not imply the Internet.

My comments are based on observations, conversation, and inference.  My executives have told me privately that world-class physicians do not necessarily become world-class business executives.  Many lack the depth of experience that is needed to know what aspects of the healthcare business is broken, duplicative, wasteful, or in need of repair.  While discussing EHR, I was told recently by a former CEO of a large hospital that his peers were making multi-multi-million dollar decisions without any sense of the data needed to support those decisions, basing them on what a friend had decided, what they read in an in-flight magazine, or a conversation they had at a convention.

There seems to be significant faith placed in the notion of, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”  That expression surfaces often when one raises the issue of why a hospital has multiple IT departments, multiple HR groups, payroll, registration, and so forth.  Why do something once if you can do it less well five times.

There seems to be enough waste that for some hospitals looking at moving forward with EHR, my first piece of advice is instead of aiming for best practices, let’s aim for a single practice.  Evaluate how to implement a shared service or managed services approach to business functions that are not part of your core business model.

I close with the notion of what other businesses call customer relationship management (CRM).  For a hospital, patient relationship management (PRM) is one of the unspoken wins waiting for someone to lead the charge.  Add a social media effort to it, and all of a sudden it’s like the hospital gave itself a facelift, at least from the perspective of the patients.

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