Patient Portal

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?

Patient Satisfaction: Why Hospitals Are Losing the Battle for Patient Revnues

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Sometimes you choose to write; other times you have no choice but to write. This is one of those other times.

For those of you who believe most business situations can be tied to something related to Mel Brooks you will appreciate this. In his movie History of the World Part One, Brooks plays the role of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with stone tablets of the fifteen commandments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YX-gqRdK_8

One set of five of them falls, hence the reason there are only ten.

Several hundred of you have read my presentation Step Aside HCAHPs; The Questions Hospital Executives Should Be Able To Answer.

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

One reader remarked that HCAHPs includes thirty-two questions, not the twenty-seven that were referenced in my slide deck.  I would like to be able to argue that as I was leaving CMS I dropped the stone tablet containing questions 28-32. I would also like to be able to fly.  Unfortunately, I can do neither.

That said, focusing on the number of questions in the survey obfuscates the point.  The number of questions CMS put forth has only a little to do with the issue of whether their questions constitute the Total Quality of a Person’s Encounter (TQE) with the hospital.

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As the picture above depicts, the effort to address patient experience only from the perspective of HCAHPs ignores much of what patients experience.  That same effort ignores all of what prospective patients, people who are trying to decide where to buy their healthcare, experience.

Let’s say your hospital treats five hundred patients a week, and thirty percent of them (150) return their surveys five months later.  The hospital may then initiate a program or two to try to raise its lowest scores.  Even if it is effective, it will not impact the experience of those who completed the survey, but it may increase slightly the scores of some future group of respondents.  The only people who will ever know are future patients.

People who will never know, and who don’t know anything about your HCAHPs scores are the people who were never your patients.  In know I am stating the obvious, but I do so because the potential revenue from that group, from the non-patients and the prospective patients, is probably greater than the revenues generated by the current patients.

Let’s also say that your hospital, the one that treats five hundred patients a week, also receives a thousand phone calls a week, and that three thousand people a week ‘visit’ the hospital via the internet.  Let’s also add another five hundred people a week who visit your patients.

That totals forty-five hundred people who experience the hospital in one form or another.  Were they satisfied?  Who knows?  They were not surveyed.  Nobody asked them what they liked. Nobody asked them if they found what they were looking for.  Did any of them decide to buy healthcare from your hospital?  Why or why not?  Did your internet presence meet their need; did the call center or the switchboard?

The lifetime value of a patient is estimated to be between $180,000 to $250,000.  The average number of people per household is three. So, for every patient you can attract and retain, plus their family members, their potential value to your hospital is $540,000 to $750,000.

Instead of Patient Experience Management, hospitals should be focused on Patient Equity Management. If a hospital lost four $2,000 computers in a week, it would learn quickly how not to lose a fifth. Hospitals lose patients and potential patients every day.  They do not know how many.  They do not know why. And, they do no know how to get them back.

Now watch what happens.  What if of the forty-five hundred people—the non-patients—you could get one percent of them (45) in any given week to decide to become your patient?  What might that amount to in terms of revenues? If you can get one percent a week, over a year, 45 people become 2,340.  Twenty-three hundred and forty people multiplied by the lifetime value of a single person’s revenue is a really big number—about four hundred million—a number so big it is silly; multiplied by the value of their family members is too big for me to count.

Now there will be those who want to argue that my numbers are way off.  To you I suggest that you make them smaller, make them a lot smaller.  Even if I am off by a factor of a hundred, which I am not, that is a $4 million dollar annual increase.

Patient Experience: How Awful is your Website?

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Egypt’s Morsi, the deposed president, has a Facebook page. I am not having much luck trying to picture him sitting in his pajamas updating it with the type of music he listens too and posting pictures of himself having a beer and a dog at a ballgame.  I find myself wondering if he and Syria’s Assad have ‘friended’ each other.  One would think the club of tyrants is fairly tight.

Today’s missive provides a hands-on look at patient experience. My wife and I were up at four AM, and reached the hospital on the outskirts of Philadelphia at six.  The very first sign we saw was this announcement, “Valet Parking for Handicapped Patients is $2 off.” Was I handicapped, and arriving for surgery without having had my coffee, the two dollar discount would have me waiting with baited breath for the opportunity to complete my customer satisfaction survey.

Having a few hours on my hands, I turned to the hospital’s web site to see if it provided an experience any more remarkable than the parking.  At first blush it appeared to provide links to everything.  Many of the links led to black holes; you followed a succession of links until you hit a dead end.  You were unable to accomplish whatever it was you set out to do, but there was enough stuff to make it feel like there must be a pony hidden somewhere amongst the detritus. 

There was a link if you wanted to make a donation, one for doctors, one for nurses, one for members of the board, more than two-dozen phone numbers, some videos, how to follow them on social media—displayed in two different places, links to teach you how to ‘eat on the go’ and how to know if you are pregnant—go to CVS, a place to view all of their awards, health information, directions, contact information, and even one for patient and visitor information.

Your website’s homepage should not be a catchall for everything someone in IT can dream up. I would estimate that more than ninety-five percent of visitors to your website are either patients or potential patients. Yet, the link for patients is no more prominent than the link for learning how to eat on the go. The website actually allows you to make a donation online.  It does not allow you to pay your bill.

Many home pages have the look and feel of Craigslist but without the functionality.

Fifty percent of patients go to a hospital’s website to determine if they will get a second opinion.  Eighty percent will visit it to determine if they will become your patient.  Behind which of those links is the information that will help them make their decision?  Which bit of information will cause them to stick with your hospital?

Some people are all set to buy healthcare from another hospital, yet they are at your web site to see if maybe they should go with you.  Some people are all set to buy healthcare from your hospital, yet they are at your website to see if maybe they should go somewhere else.

Has anyone in your health system ever asked either group of people what they need to find on your website to get them to select your organization and then designed a website to accomplish that?

According to Nielsen, users will stay on a web page for 10-20 seconds.  First time visitors spend less than that. If they do not find a value proposition, something to compel them to stay they leave.  The average visitor only reads twenty percent of what is on the page.  Look at your hospital’s homepage.  Think about how much you can accomplish in ten seconds.  If you were thinking of seeking a second opinion, could you even find what you were looking for?  On average, 70% of people leave the site, and hence purchase healthcare somewhere else because they could not find what they needed.

They were dissatisfied.

They had a bad experience.

Patient experience occurs before someone gets to the hospital, and it occurs outside of the physical building.

Patient Satisfaction: The Problem with Patient Surveys

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So there I was going through the mail and I happen upon a letter from a restaurant I dined at a few months ago, Le Nez Du Cochon—the nose of the pig—go figure, it is French.  Enclosed is a survey; twenty-seven questions.  Tell me if you know where this is headed.

The questions were grouped in a number of areas; food quality, communication with the wait staff, noise, and cleanliness of the restroom.  I completed the survey, but I was only guessing at my responses because it had been so long since my meal. What I do recall however were things that the survey did not cover.

I made my reservation online and that the restaurant had no record of my reservation.  I even remember calling the restaurant to confirm my reservation, which they did over the phone and then somehow had no record of it.

The directions I copied from their website were wrong. I told the maître de I had requested a table by the window and was promptly seated by the kitchen door.  When I went to pay for the meal I was overcharged because they brought me a wine different from the one we ordered.  The manager explained that since we had drunk the wine there was no way he could change the bill to reflect my order.

Needless to say, the directions to return home were also wrong.  My experience was poor from the moment I initiated contact until and after I arrived home.

But the survey did not ask anything related to the parts of my experience that related to whether I would return or not.  Having clean restrooms and a polite wait-staff did not overcome the rest of my experiences.

We all have experiences.  The problem is that not all of the experiences are satisfactory.

What hospitals fail to notice is clean restrooms, and scoring well on the other twenty-six HCAHPs questions are not reflective of a patient’s total experience, and they offer zero input as to the level of satisfaction a patient or prospective patient—a buyer of healthcare—had on the web or by phone.

Hiring coaches does nothing to improve the interaction on the web or the phone.

Buying data does less than nothing.  Putting those two efforts in place and thinking you have a handle on patient experience is as futile as counting backwards from infinity twice.

Patient satisfaction: A remarkable experience for every patient every time…on every device.

An Open Letter to Hospital Executives

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To whom it may concern,

I am passionate about improving the experience patients and prospective patients have with hospitals, from prior to be admitted and through post-discharge interactions.  HCAHPs only address a fraction of an individual’s experience, and surveying what happened months ago will not help retain or refer patients. The same are true regarding hiring coaches and purchasing patient satisfaction data.

I have improved customer experience and customer interactions for firms who have a combined customer base of more than two hundred million.  More people probable visit the hospital each day via the web and by phone than walk through its doors, yet the satisfaction of those interactions is unknown. This becomes even more important as the business model moves from heads in beds to population health. 

Below are links two documents for your consideration. One looks at defining a global patient experience strategy for the organization, the second lists twenty-seven questions about patient satisfaction left unasked.

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

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

Please let me know if we may meet or schedule a call.

Regards,

Paul Roemer

Chief Patient Experience Officer

How To Keep Losing Prospective Patients

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ImageHalcyon days.  This is what the seventies created.  For those thinking this is the lead guitarist for Aerosmith, Dream On.  Where were my parents when I was thinking this was cool?

While running this weekend I was passed by someone who was the spitting image of me at seventeen. Long, loping strides, not an ounce of visible fat, his hair tied back in a ponytail.  (I would keep the fat in a heartbeat to get my hair back.)  At the end of my run my neighbor asked me why I was executing the yoga funeral position on her front lawn—I was reclined fully, my arms by my sides, had I been wearing an oxygen monitor it would have redlined.  I thought I was simply trying to breath.

On Friday one of my favorite people on the planet, someone I had not heard from in thirty years, viewed my profile on LinkedIn.  I invited her to connect.  As of now the invitation has not been accepted.  And as she is an assistant DA, in an effort not to have her last memory of me as that of a stalker, I am inclined to assume I am no longer thought of as one of her favorite people.  Cherchez la femme.

Apparently you cannot go back.  Unless you happen to run a hospital.

I find it helps to separate the business of healthcare—how it is run—from the healthcare business—the services delivered.  I focus on how it is run; an 0.2—if you read this aloud as ‘oh-dot-2’ the use of ‘an’ makes more sense–model with outdated business processes and seventies technology trying to operate in a 2.0 world.

Most hospital executives would agree they are striving to achieve a common goal.  From where I sit, that goal should be sustainability.  You can deliver the best care in the world, but if you cannot afford to keep the lights on, your skill at delivering great care sort of becomes secondary.

Sustainability has two factors;

  • the ability to retain patients
  • the ability to attract new patients.

Patient attraction and retention are very closely connected to the answer to the question, “How easy is it to do business with your hospital?”

Unfortunately, I would wager that there is not a single person in your hospital who can answer correctly that question.  The only people who can answer that question are the people who buy healthcare from your hospital, and those who considered buying it from your hospital but who chose another hospital.

And nobody is asking them.

What if those people ‘in the know’ at your hospital, those who manage the budgets, those whose last image of a patient was when they had their tonsils removed, could see how patients and prospective patients perceive your hospital.

Ignoring chronic disease, I am willing to bet the more than fifty percent of your hospital’s revenues in the next five years will come from new patients. Who are they, who could they have been, and why did they or did they not choose your hospital are pretty important questions to answer.  Does your hospital have the tools to answer those questions?

The questions would seem much less inconsequential if there was a way for your executives to view how people decide if they are going to choose your hospital to deliver their care.  How would those executives react if they were able to view prospective patients (customers) visiting and then quickly leaving the hospital’s website?

Imagine the executives seated in the board room, drinking their café mochas, and watching live feeds of people going to your web site.  The first visitor spends a minute on the home page, and then clicks on the link for ‘Our Lady of Patient Experience Hospital.’  Your executives look at each other wondering why the person went somewhere else.  They pull up the homepage, assess it, and find it to be exceptional.  Every piece of information, including forty-seven phone numbers, is depicted on the page.  What more could people want, wonder the executives?

The executive committee spends several hours watching people interact with their website.  They do not know how many people will return to the site, how many people selected their hospital for services, how many people had a remarkable experience, or why people went elsewhere.

Before hospital executives try to answer the question about the hospital’s sustainability, they ought to consider what it would take to answer those four questions.

If it is not easy for people to do business with your hospital, they won’t.

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 Downside of Patient Experience

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The Enchanted Forest was my first employer. My job was to direct cars to available parking, affix bumper stickers to those cars, and pick up the discarded Pampers—I lasted less than a day.

I mention that because today I had the pleasure of laboring through security at Philadelphia International Airport. Cattle awaiting slaughter in Chicago’s stockyards have a better experience.  Given the choice of being a TSA agent or picking up Pampers at the Enchanted Forest I’ll take the Pampers.  Lest we forget, all Americans should be forced to go through airport security once a year just to remember what those clowns did to us on 9-11.

I am flying USAIR; not by choice.  One of my fellow alums, our school’s poster child for success, is the CEO of USAIR.  I bet he flies Southwest, or maybe he does the John Madden thing and rides in his own bus whenever he has to travel.

Remember the old airline slogans, “We love to fly and it shows,” and “Fly the friendly skies of United,” and Delta’s “We’re ready to fly when you are”?  Today the universal slogan of the airline industry is, “We don’t like flying any more than you do, but hey, it’s a job.  We are no worse than the other airline.”  There is no pretense about competing on customer experience.  Far from it.

Airlines no longer even pretend to compete on price. It is almost as though they compete with one another to see which airline can come up with the most irritating surcharges.  Should we be forced to make an emergency water landing—as though there is anything other than an emergency water landing—your seat cushions may be used as flotation devices.  There is a five dollar non-refundable charge for those who may wish to use their seat cushions to save themselves and their loved ones.  A flight attendant will be passing through the aisle to collect payment and unlock your cushion.

To board the plane I had to pass between two closely aligned, six-foot, vertical, buttered rollers that were designed to lubricate both sides of each passenger to enable passengers to squeeze into the aircraft’s Barbie Doll seats.  As I am seated in an exit row I decide to take advantage of an on-the-spot micro-business opportunity.  I stand and announce to my fellow passengers, “Should we be forced to make any type of emergency landing you may wish to exit the plane.  There is a five dollar non-refundable charge for those who may wish to exit through my window exit.  I will be passing through the aisle shortly to collect payment.”

The marketing campaign for the airline industry seems as though it was pulled almost word for word from the Les Misérables song, Master of the House.  “It doesn’t cost me to be nice, nothing gets you nothing, everything has got a little price. Master of the house, keeper of the zoo, ready to relieve them of a sous or two…charge ‘em for the lice, extra for the mice, two percent for looking in the mirror twice.”  Essentially their customer retention plan is we can do whatever we want to you…if you don’t like it you can always walk.  “Two percent for looking in the mirror twice.”

Customer experience.  Patient experience.  Driving to the airport this morning NPR ran an advertisement from a Philadelphia hospital that was touting its hip and knee replacement offering.  You may not know this, but hospitals have a department that specializes in business development—I kid you not.  Highly trained individuals, MBAs—most likely all of the airline CEO positions were taken, toil day after day trying to figure out the answer to the question that has plagued mankind since the invention of the Band-Aid, ‘How do we get sick people to come to us’?  Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…healthcare’s business development strategy could be dubbed the Statue of Liberty strategy. 

Sometimes the business development people get together with the marketing people—it is like a Mensa meeting minus the mense—no need to look it up; I was just going for the alliteration.  I think this is how the billboard strategy of attracting patients came into being.  You know the one about which I am writing.  A mile or so from every hospital is a mammoth billboard depicting a photo of the hospital’s urologists—substitute your favorite specialty—all of whom are smiling.  I think the idea behind the billboard is to entice you to use their services should you happen to be passing a kidney stone as you are driving by.  (I read that in California the photo of the urologists has been replaced with a photo of the nip-&-tuck squad.)

What many hospitals seem to have failed to notice, or to have made operational, is that prospective patients choose their providers.  This has been going on for well more than a decade.  I know this because when I had my heart attack the ambulance driver determined where I was to be treated, a hospital fifteen minutes from my house.  For the last ten years I have chosen to travel more than an hour each way to the cardiologist I selected.  The original hospital, which has lost tens of thousands of dollars by not retaining me, does not even know if I am alive.  They never called to find out.  By the way, they have a lot of billboards.

Patient choice is undermining a lot of hospitals’ revenues.  As much as the healthcare industry would like us to believe that people choose their provider only based on specializations and mortality rates, other factors come into play.  One of those other factors, perhaps the biggest factor, is patient experience and their satisfaction with that experience.

Cancer Treatment Centers of America seem to have figured that out.  Their advertisements appeal to our base Freudianish needs, that the individual is special and wants to be treated as such.  CTCA does not advertise that you will not die if they treat you.  Their advertisements and their testimonials focus on the fact that their patients are treated like family. 

Essentially CTCA  have figured out that it is good business to approach cancer patients as smart customers.  CTCA cannot campaign on the fact that their patients don’t die.  Unfortunately cancer patients die, so that dog don’t hunt.  They cannot campaign on the fact that their treatment doesn’t make you nauseous, but as I also know from personal experience, chemo is awful, so that dog don’t hunt either.  So CTCA claimed the unclaimed ground, the ground over which none of their competitors are fighting; patient experience.

The CTCA’s phone lines are open 24 x 7, or you can reach them through a chat line to let them convince you about their integrated, specialized plan to treat you.  (They do not however have an iPad app which means they just lost points in the patient experience bonus round.)

Their patients travel across states at great personal expense.  Their patients are willing to pay more for even the possibility of a better experience.

I’ll close with this.  Almost every hospital has at least one MRI.  Each MRI probably delivers the same high quality images.  Each hospital probably has equally competent radiologists to read the images.  What then is your hospital’s competitive advantage?  Perhaps it is time to be able to answer that question.  The downside of competing on patient experience is that to do so you had better be pretty good at it.

Patient Satisfaction: Still buying Data and Coaching, Why?

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Think about the answer to this question, how many nights have you spent in a hotel in the last decade?  For most of us the answer is more than one hundred.  How many nights have you spent in a hospital in the last decade?  For most of us the answer is probably between none and ten.  So then, when you go somewhere to spend the night and have your meals delivered, from which organization do your expectations about being satisfied most likely come?

Patient, customer. Hospital, hotel. Tomato, ta-mah-tow.  For those who want to argue that there are no similarities feel free to continue to do so.  For the rest of us let us look at how to improve patient satisfaction.

A few days ago I spoke with a hospital CEO about his efforts to improve the patient experience and about patient satisfaction.  He said that for years his hospital has spent a lot of money buying all sorts of data about their patients’ experiences.  The problem he said is that the company providing the data never did anything more than sell them the data.  So they kept getting all of this data but never saw any improvement in their patients’ experience that could be tied to the data they purchased.

That hospital has also hired coaches in the belief that this would help improve the experience.  The results were the same.

I asked him why he kept spending money when the expenditures failed to deliver the desired result.  He replied that the two things he knew he could do that would yield the greatest and most immediate increase in patient satisfaction would be to increase the number of parking spaces and to improve the food service.  Did he learn that from the survey data or from the coaching?  Nope.  He learned that from his patients’ family and friends.

Four rules worth remembering:

  1. Experience and satisfaction are related but they are not the same.
  2. Every patient has an experience but the experience does not always result in a satisfied patient.
  3. Patient satisfaction cannot be improved without knowing a patient’s expectations.
  4. Purchasing data and paying for coaching do not change rules 1-3.

Having thousands of data points comparing how your hospital is performing against other hospitals gives you a report card; it does not improve either the patient’s or patients’ experience. Coaching employees probably will not improve patient experience.

It is not the employees that need fixing.  Broken, outdated processes result in dissatisfied patients.

Patients have multiple points of contact with the hospital; before they are admitted, while they are in the hospital, and when they go home.  If you can answer the following questions you have a basis for improving patient satisfaction.

  • Which points of contact have the greatest impact on patient satisfaction?
  • When did anyone last ask patients to define their expectations?
  • Which points of contact affect most of your patients?
  • Which points of contact are frequented most by your patients?
  • What are the consequences of not knowing these answers?

The answers to these questions do not require purchasing data, nor do they require coaching.

Two highly frequented points of contact are your website and your call center.  Go to your web site and try to complete a simple task—schedule an appointment, or try to understand your bill—taks that might be done by a patient or by a patient’s family member.  Could you do it?  Were you satisfied?

Now dial the call center and ask the person who answers the phone a question about Medicaid or Medicare billing.  Could that person give you the correct answer?  Could the person they transferred you to give you the correct answer?  Did the recorded voice telling you to call back between the hours of eight and five give you the correct answer?  Were you satisfied?

If you were not satisfied, why would you expect your patients to be satisfied?  Satisfaction has everything to do about processes and customer service.  Data and smiles do nothing to improve broken processes and poor customer service.

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Why your Website is Killing Patient Satisfaction

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Hospitals probably have more than one hundred points of contact with each patient.  These points of contact (POCs) begin before the patient is admitted and continue after the patient has been discharged.

The first contact may come by a visit to one of the hospital’s clinics, a 3 A.M. call to a primary care physician, or browsing the hospital’s website.

Yesterday I assessed whether the website of a large hospital group was functional or whether it was just a website window-dressed to look like a customer portal. I assess functionality based on whether I was able to accomplish what I set out to accomplish.

I counted dozens of different phone numbers to call. Along with the list of numbers were links for physician and employee portals, links to the board, a link for donors, wellness, specialties, medical professionals, and dozens more, all on the front page. 

There was even a link, albeit not a portal for patients—a rather important link since the number of visits by patients and prospective patients probably greatly exceeds the combined number of visits by all other visitors to the site.  Unfortunately the patient link was imbedded with six other equally weighted links.

I clicked the patient link and was greeted by two-dozen new links, each displayed as being of equal importance.  There were links for patients to use before coming to the hospital and links for them to use once they were home.  Points of contact with your hospital.  Points of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. 

I clicked some more.  Schedule an appointment.  There are actually two links for scheduling an appointment.  The first link gave me a phone number I could call M-F between 8 and 5:30 P.M.  What number do I call at 6 PM I wondered?  I tried the second link; it took me to the same place. Could I schedule an appointment online or through a mobile device?

What did I learn? There are 168 hours in a week.  Their scheduling service operates for 47.5 hours a week, 28% of the week’s hours. If I dialed that number after hours would I get a recording telling me how important my call was?  If my goal was to schedule an appointment using their website, or to schedule an appointment at any time on any device not only did the hospital not meet my expectation, it did not even offer me an alternative. A dead-end.

If it costs the hospital thirty dollars to schedule an appointment by phone and nothing to schedule an appointment online, why not complete the task correctly, the first time, and for zero cost?

I next looked at what I could do when I was home, more POCs, more chances to be satisfied or dissatisfied. 

Manage my medical records. Using the website I was able to print and mail, two very non-electronic processes, a request to have my records printed and mailed to me.  There was no way to submit my request using their website.  If I did not own a printer or did not have access to a printer my expectation was not met, and was I not offered an alternative.  Some people, a whole lot of people, actually like to complete tasks using a tablet or smart phone. Another dead-end.

Let’s try billing. For Medicaid patients there are two numbers to call for help understanding your bill. That means understanding Medicaid bills is a nontrivial exercise.  That tells me that if I asked the same Medicaid billing question of three different people I might expect to get three different answers.  Why not design the sight so that it provides one right answer to whatever question is asked?  Why not include an online chat feature? Why not create a link to a YouTube video, produced by the hospital that explains Medicaid billing?

Medicare.  No link to prequalifying, not even a phone number for questions.

How to pay your bill.  Perhaps the most difficult and least desirous task a patient must do. There is no link explaining the various components of the bill, and nowhere on the site is a copy of a sample bill explaining or highlighting the various sections of the bill.

There is also no link to understand how to file a dispute or a claim with a payer.  Maybe it is not possible to do this for every payer, but using the 80:20 rule there must be ways to help the majority of patients understand what they are up against rather than having them face down the evil empires on their own.

Patients come to the hospital’s website with expectations.  Patient satisfaction is repeatedly won or lost at your hospital’s website and on the phones.  POCs.  Having a tool that proposes to help patients with their bills that not only does not help them but that adds to their frustration will crush patient satisfaction.

Hospitals want patients to pay their bills and to pay them on time.  Patients who do not understand their bill will not pay more completely, nor will they pay faster.

The next time you look at your hospital’s website ask yourself how different it would look had someone asked a patient how it should function.

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