EXECUTIVE CORNER: Is Customer Experience Your Top Initiative?
Brandi Narvaez, Chief Customer Officer
In a recent study on healthcare and social media, PWC reported that 44% of consumers will share a positive hospital experience via social media; 40%of those same consumers will share a negative hospital experience.
Whether that statistic scares you or delights you, one thing is clear: Patient satisfaction has never been more important. And not just because of social media. HCAHPS, the new required survey tool used to provide more transparency around hospital care to improve quality, provides a powerful incentive to focus on the patient. But more importantly, driving a positive patient—or customer—experience is simply the right business decision.
Sometimes in healthcare IT (HIT), we feel removed from patient satisfaction. We don’t directly touch the patient, yet HIT still impacts satisfaction. Why? Because delight flows downhill. When your clinicians are satisfied, your patients are satisfied. And the technology you give your clinicians has a lot to do with their satisfaction when they touch it up to 80 times a day. Make their technology day and they will treat their patients with more patience.
That’s why we work with HIT to be advocates for the clinicians. To be a trusted advisor, and uniquely position you to delight the clinicians while helping them be more efficient. As an HIT professional, you can do it too with 3 simple steps:
- Increase personal touches. Position the monitor so your clinician can see and talk to the patient while capturing data.
- Find ways to make your caregiving customers right. Your clinicians have a workflow for a reason. Understand their reasoning and their needs and you will know how to satisfy their requests.
- Understand the business to make meaningful recommendations. At the end of the day, technology is supposed to make the clinician’s work easier. You need to understand that workflow before you can simplify it.
Satisfaction is rooted in the experience. A few personal steps will go a long way to enhance the clinicians’ technology experiences. An experience that will make them feel like the technology was not forced on them but rather implemented for them. The end result is satisfaction that flows from you to the clinician to the patient.
What’s your satisfaction challenge? Share and let the readers help you solve it through this blog.
