In a 2014 study by GE Healthcare, it was reported that, “An alarming 81% of consumers are unsatisfied with their healthcare experience, and the happiest consumers are those who interact with the system the least…”
Healthcare consumers now expect to experience healthcare in a seamless, well-designed system that is accommodating, friendly, responsive, and with as few points of friction as possible. They want easy access to appointments, test results, and other data on their mobile devices, as well as telehealth options and other accommodations.
In Adam Brandenburger’s HBR piece, “To Change the Way You Think, Change the Way You See,” he invites us to look at the world differently, to try and see things that others miss. Here are four “shifts” to help you consider new ways to significantly improve, if not transform, the experience for your patients.
Shift to focus on your employees
Failing to focus on the needs, feedback, and health of your employees is the quickest way to undermine your efforts to improve the patient experience. Arguably, the patient experience would not require special initiatives if the employee experience were optimized. Studies continue to indicate that fully engaged employees are more productive, make fewer mistakes, and provide better service.
Here are a few quick tips to leverage:
- Get selective about who you attract, hire, and retain.
- Invest in a robust onboarding approach and orientation to your culture.
- Invest in training to develop and realize your organization’s fullest potential.
- Involve staff in problem solving and decision making.
- Communicate with consistency, transparency, and clarity.
- Celebrate strategically by connecting the praise to your values.
- Measure engagement frequently and efficiently (the fewer questions the better) and share broadly.
Shift to design thinking
Design thinking is a creative, empathetic problem-solving approach. Adopting practices like idea generation, rapid prototyping, and continuous testing to tackle complex challenges is helping our clients understand the needs and experiences of people. In essence, this approach is better defining the problem to be solved before coming up with a solution.
Armed with a thorough understanding of needs and current experiences, you can use design thinking to intentionally redesign the way patients interact with and experience healthcare services. And because design thinking encourages continuous testing and refining ideas, feedback is sought early and often―especially from patients and their families.
Quick tips to leverage:
- Identify a small number of challenges to tackle—constraint is productive and necessary.
- Assign a small, multi-disciplinary team to study the challenge and patients impacted.
- Use qualitative research methods (surveys, focus groups, observations) to better understand the patient experience.
- Seek out patterns among needs and experiences to define the real problem.
- Brainstorm solutions and rapidly prototype to test the solutions (think minimal viable product, like a flowchart or mock-up).
- Test the prototype to collect feedback with actual users and patients, then refine the approach.
Shift to provide actionable, real-time data
Timely, accurate, and meaningful data is a critically important element of being able to be responsive to the needs of patients. Data collection in healthcare is still often manual and typically not integrated with safety reports, financial, operational, and other data sets, resulting in a fragmented approach to analytics that is neither actionable nor predictive.
Find ways to capture near-real-time information about patient experiences so that course corrections can be made in the moment; feedback can be shared broadly as a learning mechanism; and data can be integrated with other operational data. Some elements to bear in mind:
- Real-time: mail-based, manually completed surveys are not timely or effective
- Convenience: providing feedback should be easy and designed with the consumer in mind
- Alignment with your goals for improvement: make sure that you are gathering data that is meaningful to your areas of focus
- Qualitative analysis: open-ended questions and sentiment analysis provide rich and nuanced insights
Shift to leverage technology and virtual solutions
Technology is ubiquitous in our lives, not for technology’s sake but for how it allows us to communicate, order services, manage our finances, provide feedback, and stay connected during times of social distancing.
Advancements and innovations in technology are revolutionizing the healthcare experience, from interactive tools that have changed how we visit with our doctor, to wearable devices that remind us when to exercise. Technology has improved appointment scheduling, access to data and even wayfinding once we are at the hospital.
Some shifts to consider:
- Electronic patient feedback systems which alert staff in real-time to issues or concerns
- Communication systems that support the immediate needs of both providers and patients
- Interactive learning and education systems that provide patients important information about their care
- Technologies that allow patients to customize their environment in waiting rooms, exam rooms, and during high stress treatments and procedures
Are you ready for a shift?
The power has shifted to the consumer in almost every other industry—retail, air travel, and financial services. Finally, healthcare’s day is here.
Improving the healthcare experience is a broad-ranging goal. The changes imposed by COVID-19 have both accelerated some of the shifts toward designing that consumer-driven healthcare system, and exposed critical gaps. Whether you have an internal focus on providing teams with tools or resources to do their jobs effectively and safely, or your focus is more on patients and families, it’s critical to keep the needs and experiences of people in center view.
