customer experience

Patient Experience: Does it all come down to wearing sensible shoes?

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The plane’s preflight music was Celine Dion, and i felt my IQ beginning to drop. Her music has the same effect on me as a Vulcan nerve pinch, making me want to curl into a fetal position. Given the choice of having to listen to an entire Celine Dion CD or sticking finger in an electrical outlet, I would give the outlet serious consideration.

Men are to talking about golf the way their counterparts are to talking about sensible shoes, only worse. Personally, I would rather listen to the discussion about espadrilles. Case in point. The gentleman on the flight. His shoes looked like they were woven from the skins of chicken ears.

“I was playing the thirteenth hole at Augusta…”–or some place, the place didn’t matter to me any more than what followed.

“Do you play?” I nodded. “What’s your handicap?”

“My swing,” I said. He smiled at me indulgently, like Ward Cleaver might have looked at June if she had accidentally dropped a brownie on the new carpet.

“The hole cat-legged to the right, and I have a natural slice. And there were three bunkers about a hundred and eighty yards out, hidden by a berm at one-seventy. You can sense my problem, can’t you.” I wanted to tell him that I did, and that it wasn’t anything that counseling couldn’t correct.

“I had my three-wood and I was playing a Titlest Pro–and you know what that means. The temperature was eighty-one, a ten-knot headwind, and the humidity had to be thirty-four. And since there was a waning moon, gosh only knows what that was going to do to the rotation of the ball once it reached altitude. I can’t even begin to tell you how nervous I was about having to figure in the curvature of the earth on the flight of the ball.”

“What kind of shoes were you wearing?” I asked.

I’ve read novels about the training snipers undergo to learn how to calculate the flight of a bullet and it seemed a lot less complicated than what this guy had to consider with his golf ball. I deja-vued to the scene in the movie “Airplane” when the woman seated next to the film’s protagonist on the plane hanged herself rather than having to keep listening to the whinging of the man next to her.

Not wanting to hear about the other seventeen holes, I pulled out my laptop, plugged in my earbuds, looked out of the plane’s window and tried to determine what affect the curvature of the earth would have on my writing. Negligible.

When I ponder the complexities of healthcare I wonder why payers–the dark side, and providers eschew fixing the easy problems. Population health management, ACOs, and the Affordable Care Act–the oxymoron is theirs not mine are very complex issues affecting both parties. These issues mandate that a lot of their strategic initiatives should be planned on an Etch-A-Sketch using a wije-board. Goodness knows how you run a business effectively when weekly Washington is firing SAMs at your attempts to figure it all out.

Just what are the easy problems being overlooked? Patient/Customer/Consumer experience.

Payers are going from a B to B model to a B to C model. Raise your hand if you enjoy calling your insurance company. Can you imagine what it will be like trying to get someone to talk to you in a retail insurance market? “The average wait time to speak with an agent is expected to be three-and-a-half weeks.” Payers should Google the word “churn.” People are going to be jumping off of that bandwagon like fleas off a dog sporting a new flea-and-tick collar.

Providers are starting to wonder where there next dollar is coming from. Clinics stole away many of their most profitable offerings, so they’ve been trying to add primary care providers (PCPs) to lock in revenues. Retailers (think CVS and Walgreens) hijacked many of the most profitable and most frequented offerings of the PCPs, so we can say goodbye to those revenues.

With that being the case, it would seem sensible to focus on any strategy that might help retain patients, customers, and consumers. Gone are the days when a provider could say “we don’t have customers, we have patients.” Without paying attention to the experiences and expectations of whatever you call them you will have neither.

The value payers and providers place on customers is very different from the value customers place on payers and providers. And the value gap is getting wider each time either organization fails to answer its phones, and fails to provide a way for a customer to complete their business online.

People need two things from their provider–they need to get better, and they need to be able to do business with their provider. With payers they need their claim to be covered and they need to do business with their payer.

Currently, the only way to do business with either one is to call them. And the people who have to make those calls would rather sit and listen to someone talk about golf than having to call.

Since neither business will ever provide a service that enables people to conduct all of their business needs correctly, one hundred percent of the time without being placed on hold or transferred to someone else who will not be able to help them, why not design a customer portal that can meet correctly, efficiently, and effectively all of their needs every time?

It all comes down to access.

A remarkable experience for every person every time on every device. It’s not a pipe dream, it’s a requirement.

Stay safe my friends, and may all of your shoes be sensible.

Patient Experience, Social-CRM & Russian Salad Dressing

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I was settling in to my first bite of overstuffed pastrami and corned beef sandwich—apologies to the vegetablists.  One of the four octogenarians seated in the booth next to me was speaking loudly to the other three about the catheterization he underwent the prior day.

Thankfully, his friend, who was eating the egg salad special interrupted him and asked, “How long have you known Bernie Westoff?”

“I don’t know Bernie Westoff,” replied the cath patient.

“He is one of your LinkedIn contacts.”

“How do you know that?”

Egg Salad stated, “I looked at your contacts.”

“Who told you you could look at my contacts?”

“You set it up that way.  Everyone can look at them”

This conversation continued for the next several minutes.  I was tempted to pull out my iPad, open the LinkedIn app, and join the fray, but instead I kept my eyes straight ahead and worried about the Russian dressing dripping down my arm.  Crowdsourcing 101.

I think the one application of crowdsourcing most overlooked is one which hardly fits the definition. This type is not premeditated and it does not originate within a company. More often than not, the company is the target of this type of crowdsourcing—Social-CRM.

Most definitions of crowdsourcing involve a call going out to a group of individuals who are then gathered via the call to solve a complex problem—problem solving—much like the Law of Large Numbers.  The crowd is likely to have an upper limit in terms of the number of members. By default, traditional crowdsourcing is fashioned to work from the top down; it is outbound, a push model.

Social-CRM (S-CRM) tends to work from the bottom up. There are no boundaries to the number of members; in fact, there can be thousands of members. Also atypical is the fact with S-CRM no single event or call to action drives the formation of the crowd. The crowd can have as many events as it has members.

The unifying force around S-CRM is each member’s perspective of a given firm or organization. Members are often knitted together by having felt wronged or put-off by an action, product, or service provided or not provided by an organization. Most organizations do not listen to, nor do they have a means by which they can communicate with the S-CRM crowdsource. This in turn causes the membership to grow, and to become even more steadfast in the individual missions of their members.

In traditional crowdsourcing, once the problem solving ends, the crowd no longer has a reason to exist, and it disbands. With S-CRM crowdsourcing, since the problem never seems to go away, neither does the crowd.

Every hospital and payer has one or more S-CRM groups biting at its ankles, hurting its image, hurting the brand, causing customers to flee, and disrupting the business model. Even so, most organizations ignore the S-CRM crowd just like someone ignores their crazy Uncle Pete who disrupts every family gathering.

The fact that your hospital may have a Facebook page and a Twitter account managed by two people who are officed in what used to be a supply closet will not do much to dampen the whinge factor created online by those individuals wondering digitally about why the hospital seems to have so much difficulty even answering its phone to schedule an appointment.

Social-CRM is not a fair fight. Perhaps the best approach is to find out why people are complaining, and then develop a plan to fix those issues that have them screaming the loudest.

 

When Hospital Leakage Turns Into a Flood

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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.

How Are HCAHPs Leading You Astray?

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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.

Everything You Need To Know About Patient Experience

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Which of the following statements are false?

  • Forty-eight percent of us believe aliens have visited the earth
  • Thirty-four percent of us believe in ghosts
  • One percent believes the earth is flat—“I put a post in a hole and adjusted it until it was level. That means the earth is flat.”
  • Eighty-to ninety percent of hospitals CEOs believe improving patient experience is one of their top three objectives in the next three to five years.

I can believe the chair next to me will support my weight, but unless I actually sit in the chair merely believing is not worth anything.

Hospitals would have us believe that what is important to consumers of healthcare is that the product—healthcare—is the same as the process of interacting with it or buying it are one in the same, or their belief that process has nothing to do with it.

Take flying for example.  Airlines want us to focus on the product, getting us from Point A to Point B.  They do not want us to focus on the fact that they will charge you if you use your flotation device, your flight will be late, and that they have packed more people into the plane than were in your high school.

My hospital has a website, let’s move on.

The US economy has developed a dependence on digital performance, including the twenty percent tied to healthcare.  Healthcare, hospitals in particular, have developed a digital illiteracy, independence, or naive indifference on all things digital and on all things related to process.

Believing that because your hospital has a website means it understands the impact the digital world should play in its business model is like believing that reading Oliver Swift gives you keen insight into what it is like to be an orphan.

The C-Suite needs to understand that technology is not the same as digital; in fact they have little in common.  In a hospital technology equates to cost—to back-office functions, to supply-chain, to why ICD-10 may be a disaster, and how it is possible to spend three hundred million dollars on EHR and see productivity take a nose-dive.

Digital is different.  It is not some emergent trend.  Please do not stop reading here even though many will disagree with what follows.  Digital is Amazon and eBay, but not in the way most people think about them.  It has nothing to do with CDs, movies, or laptops.  It has nothing to do with what they sell or the price at which it is sold.  It has everything to do with the process by which customers act with what is being sold.

The process, the processes are everything.  They are everything that the processes within a hospital are not, everything that the health exchange is not.  The processes are:

  • Intuitive
  • Easy

And the processes are intuitive and easy because they were designed to be that way.  We are not talking about tweaking things.

The less you understand about the importance of having a remarkable digital presence the less likely you are to have one.  Hospital executives may understand it least of all.  The poorer your understanding, the poorer the delivery of your product is, and the poorer its perception is in the marketplace.

And to make a bad story worse, by the time your hospital gets it your competitors will have already passed you by.

We are not talking about being better at what you are—the grammar is poor but the intent is not.  The discussion that your customers are begging for, the discussion they expect is about your hospital becoming what you are not.

And what does being what you are not look like?

In less than three years every hospital process, every single nonclinical function that is performed today by nonclinical employees will be performed by your patients and by prospective patients.  Every process will be performed without waiting and without error and without much cost.  It will performed digitally and on a device and at a time of the person’s choosing.

Your customers will carry your hospital around in the purses and briefcases.  And that is how I define improving patient experience.

Patient Experience: Why is it like Greek Mythology, and why is that bad?

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The pastor was teaching on the book of Leviticus, more specifically the part where lepers had to shout the warning “unclean” as they passed people on the street.  I had a client once who tried to induce me to yell the same warning when I passed people in his office.  Sometimes instead of consulting the idea of being Willy Loman looks pretty good.

Sometimes we decide something cannot be done and our only supporting argument is because they have never been done—meaning we have tried to do them.  Some things are difficult, some are nigh on impossible, and some are impossible.  (I usually try to accomplish two or three things before breakfast.) Greek mythology tells us of Sisyphus, a deceitful ruler who was punished by being forced to roll a giant boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat the task forever.

Here is an example of a Sisyphean task.  Place you back against the wall of whatever room you are in.  Your task is to reach the other wall, and every step you take cuts the remaining distance in half.  No matter how many steps you take you will always have half as far to go from the distance of your prior step.

We all have our boulders.  Endeavoring year after year to raise HCAHPs scores and to achieve survey ratings of one hundred percent is healthcare’s Sisyphean task. There are returns, diminishing returns, and no returns.  Is the best scoring the one that places your organization in the fiftieth percentile?  What is the business benefit of being rated first or second?

Children teach us that there is a fallacy created by using superlatives and in measuring perfection.  They begin arguments with phrases like you always and you never.  These arguments are easily rebutted, for all you need is to find the exception, the instance where the tautology does not hold.

There are grossly diminishing returns earned from trying to hit benchmarks around always achieving a goal because you can prove the negative by finding a single false occurrence.

A month ago I was in Los Angeles.  The only thing I recall with certainty is that I stayed in a Marriott, and that the Marriott charged me twenty-nine cents for checking why my message light was lit, a message they left me welcoming me to the hotel.  I do not recall the floor my room was on, the side of the hall on which it was located, whether the employees always smiled, whether the bathroom was always cleaned, the noise level of the room, nor the color of the carpeting. Five months from now I will not be able to remember the name of the hotel.  Can you recall these details from your last trip?

It would be silly of anyone to ask me these things six months later.  If I am in a good mood I might invent positive scores.  If I am in a bad mood, who knows how I would score the questions.  I would certainly discourage the Marriott from taking my input too seriously, and I would caution them from investing any resources trying to change their processes based on my invented responses.

Riddle me this, then why does that seem to be the model under which everyone in healthcare operates, trying to hit Sisyphean standards?  People are asked to score their recollections about something that happened six months ago, that happened when they were in pain, bored, and taking medication.  For them to score their experience of the hospital the most favorably they have to say that something favorable happened one hundred percent of the time.  That is, the hospital was never noisy, the bathroom was always clean, the pain was always managed, and everyone always smiled.

Superlatives.  The wrong measure of success.  The wrong measures of patient experience, retention, and referrals.  Let’s face it.  Hospitals will have noise and employees will have bad days—and the patients know it.  So why then put all of your patient experience eggs in only one basket?

Patients have expectations, prospective healthcare buyers have expectations.  And yet nobody ever asks them about what expectations they have and nobody tries to design experiences around those expectations.

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As an industry we are led to believe that we have our arms around patient experience simply because we are measuring and responding to survey responses, buying data, and hiring coaches.  The questions, and their resulting weights, were developed without ever speaking to a patient let alone speaking to hundreds of patients or prospective patients.

The point is that nobody knows what kind of experience patients and prospective patients expect of any of the contacts and interactions people have with a hospital.  We do not know because we have not asked.

We do not know what people expect to be able to do when they go to a hospital’s website to make a purchase of healthcare.  Clearly people go to a hospital’s website with some purpose in mind.  They expect to accomplish something.  There are dozens of things they would like to accomplish but nobody knows what they are because nobody has asked them.

This is real Patient Access:

I selected twenty hospital websites to see what I could accomplish using their site.  My tasks were simple; view available appointments, actually schedule an appointment, reschedule an appointment, schedule a lab, complete the pre-admission process, learn how to file a claim, issue a complaint, use online chat, download my personal health records, receive a clear explanation of my bill, understand what my procedure will cost me, get information about a second opinion.

Most hospital websites read like reading a Wiki:

I could not accomplish any tasks on any of the sites I visited. I could however get information about the hospital’s board, learn how to make a donation, find out about what hours the gift shop is open, get directions, read the hospital’s blog, “like” the hospital, learn what awards have been given, and learn about the history of the hospital.

People go to the web because they know they cannot get the information they need by calling the hospital.  Then they learn they cannot get what they need from the web.  Where do they go?  Who knows?  The only thing we know for sure is that their expectations about their experiences are not being met.  They also know that nothing is being done about it.

One final thing I did not see on any of the hospital websites I visited was the hospital’s HCAHPs score.  Why is that worth noting?  It is worth noting because if HCAHPs mattered to those buying healthcare, if hospital’s believed HCAHPs are an actual reflection of what patients think of their experience, the scores would be posted front and center.  HCAHPs are not important to patients.  HCAHP scores are not included in marketing letters; they are not posted on billboards, or spoken of on NPR commercials.

Meeting expectations determines whether people will buy healthcare from your hospital.  Improving HCAHP scores determines whether or not your hospital will be fined.

Improving HCAHP scores and improving patient experience are two very different goals.  Only one increases revenues.

Patient Experience with a JD Power Twist

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Everyone knows the elephant in the room.  Unfortunately the elephant does not know any of them.

I read Toyota’s US president has decided to change Toyota’s business strategy as a result of the latest JD Power rankings.  Even though Toyota regained the world-wide leadership in car sales on July 30, 2013, it did not have a single car listed in JD Power’s initial quality results across all body styles.

“Perhaps all of the other automobile manufacturers have discovered automotive’s secret sauce.  We sell more cars than anyone else, but what good is that if we do not meet Power’s criteria.  Sure our customers swear by us, but what do they know about cars?” Asked James Edsel. “They just want something that looks cool, has great speakers, and a USB connection.”

James continued by explaining, “We have decided to follow the strategy of the US healthcare industry.  Health systems thought they were doing pretty well with their understanding of their patients’ experiences until CMS came along with its HCAHPs ratings and told them how to really measure the entirety of patient experience.  Now hospitals can see what a tiny fraction of their patients actually thought of their care months back when they received it.  They can pay money for their own data, and hire people to make their numbers look better the next time they pay for their data.”

“After all, why rely on what all of your customers and prospective customers tell you when you can simply go to one source and have them tell us what they think we need to hear.  One report and someone else does all the work.”

I’ll leave it to you to decide if there is a workable analogy there. To be fair, I heard the analogy while speaking with someone yesterday who is way smarted than me.

JD Powers is a business.  It conducts market research based on customer surveys. It then sells the research to the automobile manufacturers.  The big difference is the automobile manufacturers are not forced to alter their business model to raise their scores.

 

Patient Experience: So what exactly do I do for hospitals?

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A number of you have written recently asking what it is I do and how I might be able to assist their organization.

I have consulted on innovating patient/customer experience for twenty-five years, having run my own consulting firm for the last seventeen. My clients on five continents have a combined customer base of more than two hundred million.

Less than twenty percent of health systems have a working definition of patient experience, and of those that do it is defined around HCAHPs. My definition is a remarkable experience for every person (patient and prospective patients) every time on every device.  Major parts of what hospitals lack are a strategy to provide that kind of experience to both patients and prospective patients.  This includes linking a mobile experience strategy and a digital strategy.  Setting this as a goal enables hospitals to focus on improving not just the care, but also on improving patient retention, patient referrals, attracting new patients, and making it easier to do business with the hospital.

In healthcare almost every hospital regards patient experience solely as defined by CMS. That ignores the experiences and level of satisfaction of those not surveyed, people seeking second opinions, and prospective patients. It ignores the experiences occurring prior to admissions, and those occurring post-discharge. It also does not address experiences formed from nonclinical processes like scheduling, admissions, billing, claims, and complaints.

More people ‘visit’ the hospital each day by phone and on the web than walk in the front door, yet nobody knows how those people rate their experience and whether they will ever return.

Eighty percent of prospective patient’s visit a hospital’s website before determining where they will buy healthcare.  Fifty percent of patients go to a hospital’s website to determine whether they will seek a second opinion. Nobody who designed the website ever asked one of those patients what information they would need to find to help them select their hospital. 

I help organizations answer these questions.

I start by helping them define a strategy for what I call the Total Quality of a person’s (patient and prospective patient) Encounter (TQE) with the hospital.  Next I complete an assessment of where they are with regard to meeting the TQE strategy including developing:

  • A digital strategy including:
    • Websites—most hospitals have hundreds of disparate URLs
    • Social media and social CRM
  • A mobile strategy for meeting their needs on various devices
    • For example, why can’t a patient schedule an appointment online or do some form of self-admitting on an iPad rather than arriving at six AM with everyone else?
  • A Call Center Strategy
  • A strategy for improving Nonclinical business processes 

Based on the assessment we jointly set priorities and a work plan to create a remarkable experience for everyone.

Attached are a few brief presentations that offer some detail.  Please let me know if we may schedule a call or perhaps meet.

http://www.slideshare.net/paulroemer/defining-a-global-patient-experience-for-your-health-system

http://www.slideshare.net/paulroemer/step-aside-hcahps

http://www.slideshare.net/paulroemer/call-center-strategies

You can reach me at paulroemer@gmail.com, or by phone 484-885-6942.

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