Patient experience remains a contentious yet critical metric in healthcare. While many healthcare professionals believe that satisfaction and experience are arbitrary measures dependent on the patient’s mood and outlook, research suggests that patient experiences truly do matter. But despite the increasing importance of patient experience, many hospitals are still not doing enough to provide improved experiences.

Introduction

Healthcare is barely recognizable from what it used to be even a century ago. Modern medical practices would be akin to actual miracles to those living a century ago, while medical practices of that time would barely qualify as scientific or medical today. The nature of progress is that it is incremental and exponential at the same time – changes happen slowly but have a drastic result later on.

It’s not just medicine that has changed over the past century, but the healthcare industry itself has seen massive overreaching changes. But one of these small incremental changes that are happening today is the fact that patients are increasingly recognizing that they want to be treated like paying customers. Gone are the days of negligible customer service in the healthcare industry. Today, patients consider themselves customers first and then as patients.

And healthcare organizations have started to recognize this now as well.

Patient experiences

One of the biggest changes that healthcare companies have had to navigate around is recognizing the fact that patients don’t just want to feel better at the end of their healthcare journey, but they also want to have good experiences during their healthcare journey as well. The journey is just as important as the destination; the experiences in the journey are just as important as the final outcomes. Patient experience in healthcare is extremely important today.

With healthcare organizations having almost entirely focused on making the patients get medically better, it came as a culture shock to many organizations when patients started demanding better experiences. The institution of patient satisfaction surveys further highlighted the change in the industry as research additionally provides a basis for the claims that patients who have better experiences also have better outcomes when compared to peers who have poorer experiences.

The move from the federal government to use patient satisfaction scores to base reimbursements on has also revealed the intention to promote patient satisfaction levels across hospitals. The metric is increasingly important in the healthcare field today and is only going to increase further as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services further integrates patient satisfaction in its future plans.

Is the industry doing enough?

With the winds of change blowing in that way, it has become imperative that healthcare organizations start focusing on patient satisfaction levels. Hospitals and healthcare providers are slowly starting to put focus on providing better experiences to their patients. But the real issue remains that what patients feel like their experiences are like rarely matches with what healthcare providers think they are providing to their patients.

Let’s take a simple example. According to a survey from Healthcare Consumer Insight & Digital Engagement Survey, 2nd Edition, Binary Fountain, 43 percent of patients found that wait time is the most frustrating part of the healthcare journey. That’s a significant proportion of patients that would have a much better experience if they had a shorter wait time or at least knew how long their wait time was going to be. Despite this, the Maximizing Patient Access and Scheduling, An MGMA Research & Analysis Report found that 43.4 percent of patients rarely if ever knew about their wait times.

Such a simple way to improve the patient experience remains mostly unaddressed. And this situation is repeated in other processes of the healthcare journey. While doctors and providers tend to think that they are providing a much higher level of service, the reality with patients is that the quality of service leaves a lot of room for improvement.

Bridging this disconnect between patient experience and provider perception remains one of the most important objectives that hospitals need to work on today. By enhancing patient experience, hospitals can unlock their growth with very minimal interventions across their healthcare process.

Conclusion

The healthcare industry is becoming more and more competitive as each day goes by. As spending power towards healthcare increases, healthcare organizations are trying to rise over the competition. With patients wanting greater experiences in their healthcare journey, healthcare organizations are realizing the need to improve the patient experience in their organization.

Despite realizing this, most healthcare organizations are not realizing that they are not doing enough to do their best in improving patient experiences. Healthcare organizations consistently overestimate their efforts toward improving patient experiences.

With careful measurement and analysis, healthcare organizations can more accurately track the patient experiences they are providing and then start to improve on them.

BraveLabs is helping healthcare organizations measure and improve the patient experiences that they are giving. Contact us today to learn what changes your healthcare organizations can make to improve patient experiences.