Work Sample #10 - Blog Post on Making Patients Happy

In February, 2018, working with a subject-matter expert for a client company, I was tasked to write a blog post explaining the concept of "patient-centricity" to a healthcare audience.

Headline: Transforming patients into satisfied consumers: What providers need to know

Subhead: How can hospitals improve patient experience for millennials and seniors?

Millennials expect more service options from healthcare than prior generations. Do hospitals and healthcare providers miss major market opportunities taking them for granted?

My short answer: Oh, yeah.

In my work consulting with healthcare providers, I talk a lot about “consumerism.” It means taking a proactive approach to customer service in healthcare, in line with high millennial expectations for retail.

Oftentimes we can fall into thinking healthcare exists somehow on a separate plane, that it all begins and ends with treatment and a positive outcome. This overlooks key evidence.

Two factors accelerate the need to improve patient experience: risk of consumer defection (50 percent of patients will switch due to poor service), and low Net Promoter Scores (NPS), also known as likelihood to recommend.

Providers can learn a lot from hotels. Like hotels, providers serve a diverse clientele, and need to manage different expectation sets, not only between age groups but within them.

One health system asked me about seniors: Who are they, and what do they need to hear from us to enroll in our Medicare plan? We did a thorough analysis, breaking out seniors into different client categories, examining what they wanted and how to reach them. We identified higher-value seniors whose business helps hospitals better afford outreach to needier seniors. The end result: a 13 percent enrollment boost for that system.

I also emphasize the need for providers to have an omnichannel front door. Some patients, usually younger, want the ability to login to a provider. Others, often older, prefer calling. Can an access system suit both?

Yes. I tell clients: Let’s set it up for those who want the click, then make it easy for those who want to escalate to a call.

There are many ways to tailor a provider’s operations around better patient experience. My common theme is that improving that experience is a team sport. It can be driven by the chief marketing officer, the CIO, even a designated chief experience officer, or CXO. But it needs a commitment across the organization to take hold.

I was recently at a health system where the marketing person set up digital scheduling for the emergency department. This was an easy overlay on their systems, and provides patients and family with needed transparency at a critical stage of the treatment process. Think about how important that peace of mind can be, and how it can foster a more positive experience for a provider to build upon.

For many consumers, healthcare’s already painful. They prefer not to be there. If we can reduce stress points on the front and back ends, and create a patient-centric process that’s both easier and simpler, we can make the whole experience less of an avoidance activity for the customer. Isn’t meeting patients halfway what good healthcare is about?