As a
follow-up to our previous post about "What keeps hospital CEOs awake at
night" we are focusing on quality, and what some people think-of as the
"X-Factor" in healthcare delivery today.
Let’s pose several questions:
-Do patients really determine the level of quality? (What is meant by “quality?”)
-Is there a link between patient experience, their perception of quality, and the level of your care team’s engagement?
We’re talking about the two-headed animal called “quality.” And this leads to the dominant revenue driver called “Brand.”
Yes, it’s marketing. And yet it’s much more than that. Brand is what matters most when “selecting” a healthcare organization. This applies to both patients and care teams. The best teams of physicians, nurses and administration leaders want to be affiliated with top “brands.”
The slick TV ads don’t matter to patients once they are inside of your organization. What matters is their own personal perception, imperfect as it may be. Every patient touch-point is an opportunity and a risk. And the best part of this? It’s all delivered by your people, and they have the power to make those touch-points all winning experiences.
CEOs do stay awake at night worrying about clinical care and containing
unnecessary expenses and reducing variability in the way care is delivered.
In many ways those objective measures of operational performance are
“easier” to box, than the “unstructured” perceptions of service quality of
patients. It can be very frustrating.
But it’s intertwined by that X-Factor that joins the clinical quality stats
with the patient perception of quality measures. That X-factor is the
care team.
Brand warfare today is happening all around us. Just turn on the radio or TV and see dueling healthcare advertisements. Expensive super-slick agency productions, they all talk about “we are more friendly” and “we know your name” and “we speak your language” and “we are in your local neighborhood.” What’s missing? “We deliver better medicine.” Because that’s not what Brand warfare is getting at. What drives the quality that is underlying this brand warfare? It’s our X-Factor— great care teams.
Getting
back to the interdependence of great care teams to great medicine, it’s also
essential to go back to the objective clinical stats and remember that highly
engaged care teams tend to make fewer mistakes, and tend to do a better job of
providing instructions at discharge, better follow-up post treatment and the
whole list of best practices that make patients “feel” more quality and love,
and also drive better medical outcomes. This is a known correlation, and
we are working to assist leaders measure and manage these connections.
But there is more.
Yes, billing is often the “last impression” a patient has with your healthcare organization. Now that’ alone is enough to keep many CEOs awake at night. Imagine this— a spectacular patient experience in both their objective clinical outcome to their true collaboration and participation in their ongoing care. But the last contact is with a cranky, ill-tempered billing department that is working on antiquated systems that make billing a nightmare for everyone. Result? Brand damage, and game-over. That patient will walk away with a huge negative and your brand is “cooked” - to paraphrase that CEO.
An
interesting study was conducted by BJC Healthcare and published in the Journal of Healthcare Management. Over 14,400 patients
were interviewed and three areas were explored that relate to Brand (and
revenue):
-Overall Quality of Care
-Willingness to Recommend
-Willingness to Return
In the study, staff responsiveness dominates the willingness to recommend and willingness to return followed by nursing care (which has big role to play in staff responsiveness as well).
Next - if you losing sleep about the size of your patient population focus less on marketing and more on creating experiences that will drive patients to recommend and return. Word of mouth has always been the most powerful marketing tool. One Hospital CEO said that every poor patient experience loses the hospital five new customers.
These seem like questions one would receive in a retail establishment or likely at a restaurant: “how is your meal? “Please recommend us on Yelp” and “here is a 10% off coupon for your next visit.” In Healthcare, brand is retail, because it is “consumer.” Patients are very sophisticated consumers, and as they gain more control over their healthcare dollars, they are moving quickly to measure value in terms of cost, quality of service and “brand” reputation as criteria, as they do in all other important areas of their lives.
Yes the world has changed. We think for the better. The top leaders we meet have long been advocates of patients as full participants and “engaged” in their treatment as well as arbiters of the “quality” of their experience, both clinically and overall.
Top leaders focus on this X-Factor of the care teams because it drives all of these operational statistics and patient quality perception measures.
What is your experience at your healthcare organization?
if you want to join the discussion on healthcare employee engagement and how to improve it, please join us at our LinkedIn group.