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?
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