Your Patient Experience – why it’s so important

How does your patient experience measure up?

Your patient experience, i.e. the quality experience patients have of engaging with your practice from the first moment they become aware of you to the point they become a loyal advocate, is your secret practice success weapon.

In a recent report published on businessnewsdaily.com looking at small business trends for 2019 one thing is abundantly clear, businesses that focus on service delivery to their customers (or patients) will fare much better than those who don’t.

Patient satisfaction Vs a great patient experience

Before we go any further I want to be clear about the difference between the patient experience and patient satisfaction. 

Patient experience and patient satisfaction are terms that are often used interchangeably. But I want to be clear at the outset that the two are quite different.

The difference between the patient experience and patient satisfaction has implications for you and the success of your practice and the quality improvements you can make in the services that you offer.

The patient experience we are talking about in this blog post covers the quality of the interactions that patients have with you and your practice. It’s an integral part of the healthcare quality you deliver. It includes easy availability of information and appointments, good facilities, great frequent communication and follow up services.

In an article dedicated to defining the two author, Sarah Heath defines it as

“The patient experience is about looking at various aspects of the healthcare system – from communication to safety to the clinical environment – and determining if they portray quality care.”

Patient satisfaction on the other hand is a subjective measure based on the patient's expectations prior to receiving care from you.
If they have previously had a poor experience they may well come with low expectations so you can blow their socks off. If however, they have previously had exceptional care from a practitioner their expectations will be really high and that might be quite a challenge to replicate.

Same patient experience and clinical care but two very different satisfaction levels.

So the only control you have over patient satisfaction is through focusing your time and energy on creating a stellar patient experience. If that is as good as it can be you have done everything you can to influence your patient satisfaction levels.

So whilst you can't control your levels of patient satisfaction because that is driven by your patient's own expectations coming to your practice, you can influence it.

I hope that helps you see the difference between the two.

Quality improvements in your practice can more readily come from assessing the patient experience than from patient satisfaction.

1. Did the reception team greet you by name - yes/no
2. Did they offer you a drink - yes/no
3. Did the clinical ask you x y & z - yes/no
4. Did your appointment run to time - yes/no

A much more subjective assessment of your performance against some already agreed service delivery standards. Set the bar high and you should be on to a winner.

So how do you differentiate your service?

In times of financial hardship price is perceived by many as being the key to winning and retaining patients but time and time again many small businesses have shone out from the masses of mediocre ones by not competing on price. These businesses genuinely care about their product and how it helps their customers and they make sure they go that extra mile to make sure they are delivering exactly what their customers want. That needs to be your approach, how you feel, and how you view your patient experience development.

Having a patient experience focus, and dedicating time energy and money to making it the best it can be, is how you are going to differentiate you and your practice from all of the other similar practices in your local area.

Why your patient experience is so important today

There was a time when businesses didn’t have to differentiate themselves. There was only one baker in the village. The commodity was the basic selection of products they sold.
When competition hotted up a bit businesses differentiated themselves by providing different products. The product was still the commodity but you won new business by providing new and unusual products. This was the start of commercialisation.
Over time competitors could changing their product range so that they could directly compete with you and you were back to square one.

In order to differentiate businesses had to innovate and change elements of their service. So while everyone was selling the same pizzas, only one pizza place in town was offering free delivery. Their business grew because the service they provided was unusual. The service became the commodity people bought.
Then every pizza shop started offering free delivery so there was no longer a competitive advantage to offering it.

Now we are entering a business phase where the whole customer experience is the commodity. From the moment a potential patient first encounters your practice on the high street or online, they start to experience and importantly, feel, how you do things. It is then up to you to build on that experience by putting the patient at the centre of what you do and focusing on their needs.

You deliver an experience that is a combination of what your patients want and need as well as elements that ensure your business is true to you, your ethics and beliefs. Because this is a unique combination of elements its very difficult for a competitor to copy exactly this patient experience, so it's going to be very hard for other practices to compete like for like on the experience they offer, so differentiation becomes clearer once again, BUT only through the customer experience, ie only those people who experience the experience will appreciate that you are different.
Marketing that experience is difficult.

Understanding your patient experience quality

If assessing your patient experience delivery is about reviewing the quality of what you do, you first have to set the standards to which you say you are going to operate. The standards that meet the expectations of you, your profession, your insurer, and your dream patients.

Don't panic you don't have to do this all at once. As the saying goes you can eat the elephant one bite at a time. You can choose to review small discreet areas of your practice one at a time and start setting the standards by which you want to operate in those areas.

• Telephone answering
• Email communication
• Cleaning
•  Waiting room facilities
• Referral system
• Products you sell
• Follow up system
• Stock control system
• New patient onboarding process
•  Maintenace protocols
• Referral reward scheme
• Practice decoration etc.

Can you see how one by one you could address each of these elements of how you run your practice and the service you deliver and improve the quality of each?

You don't have to achieve all of this in 2 weeks, do this at your own pace within your own capacity - BUT DO IT! 

Economy or first class?

A simple way to start this process is to choose one element of your practice and grade it. BUT this is not about how much each element costs it's about how well it works to deliver what you want to deliver and ultimately how it makes you feel about that element of your business. From hell yes we are smashing this to oh no not that again.

An easy way to do this is to think about the classification of airline tickets in relation to each element of your practice.

First-class - if you had all the time and money in the world you would not change how you do this or how you deliver that particular element of your service. It is perfect (for now)

Business-class - this is pretty dam good, things that work but when you have the resources there are still improvements you could make. It could be things that you chose to do or have and were 1st class but now there is new technology, improved design, or better automation you could use.

Premium Economy - You chose to do this or have this and it's Ok for now but it's definitely not perfect, it doesn't make you happy or proud and you can clearly see how we could upgrade it to improve the service you offer. It could also be something that actually was working well but now you've outgrown it.

Economy-class - this was all that was available at the time or was all you knew how to do and it gets you through but it frustrates you or is inconvenient or is, in all honesty, broken. It makes you feel embarrassed and definitely not first class. 

Going step by step through each element of your practice and categorising where you are at in relation to these grades will help you see where improvements to your patient experience could be made.

Walking in your patient's shoes

Another dimension to this review is to go directly to the recipients of your service, your existing patients. From that first patient contact through the process of getting to know you, like you, trust you, try your expertise, buy from you, and recommend you, you have to ensure that the experience they have is consistent, is something they value, and really makes a emotional human connection.

Remember we said at the beginning that people get a feeling about your practice? Well, emotion i.e. how you make potential patients feel before they have even step foot in your practice, is so important when it comes to attracting more of your dream patients. Emotion is a really strong trigger to buy.

So developing your patient experience needs to focus on how you make people feel throughout the experience.

1. You can start by putting yourself in the shoes of a potential patient and look at every element of that experience from their very first contact, to being a loyal customer. How can you ensure you create a great first impression, maintain that, and nurture the relationship and make them feel valued?

2. Get straight-talking patients to provide you with frank and honest feedback on the service you deliver. Ask about every element from the communication, clinical service, facilities, and support service.

3. Ask a friend or acquaintance who fits the profile of your dream patient to review your website and social media. Get them to walk past your practice, to pop in and say hello and to call and e-mail your practice incognito. What impression do they get of your practice?

How does what you're projecting into the world make you and them all feel?
This is a key question to ask.

Top Tip – don’t ask your family or well-meaning friends because they won’t want to hurt your feelings! You need frank honest feedback for this exercise to be effective & provide you with the information you need to develop your patient experience further.

Take the feedback on board

Listen really carefully to what they say and look really carefully at your own honest thoughts too. Don't be offended or take it personally. Get excited - what they are telling you and what you are becoming aware of is marketing and business development gold dust.

Take what you learn and start to introduce changes to how you run your practice, deliver your clinical skills, and support your patients.

Top Tip - Change is scary to some people so make sure that all of your team members are educated to understand the importance of the customer experience that you all collectively deliver on the success of the business so that hey fully appreciate the need for change.
You are not selling appointments.

Working one by one through each element of the practice document what your quality standards are going to be for each one.  This is going to be the bar against which you can then measure your service delivery. 

Let's take the first item off our previous list of areas in your practice - Telephone answering.

• How do you grade the quality of the current system that you have in place?
• What new standards do you want to set for this task?
• What about telephone answering is going to wow your dream patients?
• What do you want to achieve every time you answer the telephone?
• What training is going to be required to ensure this new standard is met every time?

From here you can document your new quality service and start delivering it and move onto the next area in the practice - possibly something related like Converting telephone inquiries into bookings. From there you might want to look at your new patient welcome process etc.

Improving the quality of your patient experience is going to enable you to differentiate your practice from those of your competitors and successfully grow your business.

Remember as I said earlier you do not need to do this overnight, but you do need to do it so start the process and start making small incremental changes that over time are going to ensure that you are providing a brilliant patient experience that will hopefully lead to a large number of your patients being highly satisfied with the service they receive. So much so that they become advocates and your on the ground marketing team.

If you provide a poor quality patient experience I think it's safe to say your practice will start to struggle (if it isn’t already) as we move further into the business phase where the customer experience is the commodity you are selling.

 

I would love to hear your thoughts on your patient experience and how you evaluate it, so please leave your comments at the end of this page.

Many thanks for taking the time to stop and read my Practice Momentum blog.