Experiencing a great patient experience: when hospitality meets hospitals

The mantra of the Ritz Carlton chain is "Ladies and gentlemen taking care of ladies and gentlemen".

The Triple Aim in healthcare strives to achieve improved quality of outcomes, reduced per capita costs and enhanced patient experience. Throw in the improving the doctor experience and you have the quadruple aim. Up the ante to the quintuple aim and you get improving the effectiveness and efficiency of business processes. The sextuple aim is to grow shareholder value.

Many health services organizations, be they hospitals, doctors' offices, or primary care pharmacies, are tripping over each other trying to create the best patient experience, one that meets or exceeds expectations. Hyperbole is rampant and we read about experiences that are "amazing", "out of this world" and "incredible". The fact is, whether it is in Denver or Dubai, Minneapolis or Mubai, very few hit the mark.

Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, service robot technology has been on the rise in the past few years. Robots like Hilton’s “Connie” and Softbank’s “Pepper” are already handling guest experiences in hotels, restaurants, and shops around the world. Self-service automated kiosks are here to stay, and robots are the future of customer service. The benefits of service robots are clear. They won’t spread airborne viruses or get burned out from harassment. They have the potential to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and automate tedious tasks. Outside of the occasional glitch or software update, robots are available to work 24/7 without sick leave, holidays, or PTO, guaranteeing that the hotel or car rental front desk is always staffed for customers’ convenience. But to see these gains, service robots must be designed and implemented the right way, otherwise customers — and human coworkers — will avoid interacting with them. Robot technology should not simply be added as a novelty, but carefully integrated to deliver value to customers and support employees — maintaining a balance between automation and human interaction.

Using robotic process automation creates opportunities for "new collar", non-university degree graduate talent.

As competition in primary care heats up, retail pharmacies and healthcare startups see a ripe opportunity to reach consumers who are falling through the cracks of the traditional healthcare system.?

The COVID epidemic has been rough on both hospitals and the sick care industry and the hospitality industry. But, in many ways, the challenges and opportunities remain the same.

If you are like most, you probably hate customer service and companies seem to be doing little or nothing to make it better.

A recent article explains why and stresses that the experience should derive from your brand identity, the defining values and attributes that distinguish a brand.

Like building a house, the author suggests that you need to build a blueprint and a customer experience architecture in 7 steps:

To develop a customer experience architecture, follow these steps:

1. The brand platform — First, define or reaffirm the overarching ideas that represent the brand. REI’s brand platform is the excitement and adventure of the outdoors; Chick-fil-A’s is exceeding customers’ expectations with a servant’s spirit.

2. Customer experience strategy — Then describe the desired customer feelings and perceptions of the brand across all interactions with the organization. An electronics website might want to create a “place” for customers to discover and be delighted by innovations. A hotelier might want customers to feel pampered by legendary service.

3. Business segmentation — The next step is to break down the business into discrete units. For a new brand, segmenting the business by traffic vs. trial vs. transition might be an illuminating approach; a restaurant company might segment by service mode, e.g., eat-in vs. drive-thru vs. carry-out; and a product-line segmentation might be appropriate for a manufacturer. The objective is to identify the different experiences the organization delivers and to articulate the requirements and objectives of each.

4. Customer segmentation — Different target segments have different needs — some customers may value convenience over price, others may be looking for an entertaining experience — so their desired experiences vary. Describe each segment with a profile and a needs inventory, including key drivers of purchase decisions and brand perceptions.

5. Prioritization — Create a grid with the business segments as columns and customer segments as rows. Each business/customer intersection represents a discrete experience to design and deliver. They should be prioritized to focus design and management. Prioritization criteria include profit potential, fit with long-term strategy, competitive advantage and differentiation, resource requirements, and how the experience affects and/or reinforces brand values and brand position.

6. Experience design — Determine how to meet the segment-specific needs in each business segment, either by improving existing approaches based on new insights from the architecture or by developing entirely new ones. All the levels of customer experience — product, service, content, channels, touchpoints, pricing, facilities, sensory engagement, etc. — should be considered and described in the design. Achieve and maintain 5-star ratings on the Forbes Travel Guide for your establishment with the help of downloadable Forbes 5-star standards checklists.

7. Assessment and integration — Now the architecture is ready to be inspected for integrity and coherence. Is the brand platform expressed throughout every experience? Do discrete experiences contribute to the overall customer experience strategy? Do experiences complement and enhance each other, or do they conflict or detract from each other?

8. Technology-Be careful how you incorporate technology and create more space between people and their analog world

Consider the hotel franchise model as a new hospital network business model

Some argue that the hospitality industry is not the appropriate model for the sick care systems business and that we need to fix how we do care coordination and communication. This report from Geisinger disputes that.

Here's a test on patient experience at your place:

1. Was it easy to find a place to park?

2. How many times were you handed a clipboard?

3. How long did you have to wait to get an appointment?

4. How long did you sit in the reception area/waiting room?

5. Was there free WIFI in the reception area?

6. How long did it take for you to get your test results? Did someone send them to you or was it your responsibility to get them?

7. Was the coffee in the lobby overpriced or free?

8. Were you charged to get a copy of your records and was it more than what it would cost at Staples?

9. Were you able to find your doctor's office easily or did you have to ask someone for directions?

10. Do you remember the names of the people who took care of you?

11. Does everybody really care or are they too burned out to do so?

12. Has your staff been trained and measured in customer service

Would you do that to your mother?

Here are three customer experience lessons:

1. 1. Focus on customers, and specifically, the effort customers go through to do business with you.?Just ask the question, “Are we making it easy for our customers?”?
2. 2. Use technology and data to support this effort.?Data is powerful when used the right way. Data gives you customer insights that help identify trends. Used correctly, you not only meet the customer’s current needs, you can also predict what they will want and expect in the future.
3. 3. Focus on employees.?Happy caregivers make happy patients.

?How can a company best create a compelling customer experience? Based on this author’s research involving thousands of companies and analyses of millions of customer data points from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the eight areas that companies need to focus on are: Orchestrating the marketing ecosystem, aligning company and customer needs, delivering amazing customer convenience, reinforcing digital marketing, adjusting customer incentives, cultivating customer evangelists, handling customer complaints, and managing product returns.

When it comes to customer experience at the nation’s largest retail pharmacy chains, there is plenty of room for improvement there too, according to Tilak Mandadi, the chief digital, data, analytics and technology officer at CVS Health .

Among other things, customers can be caught off guard by the price of their prescriptions when they go to pay, they might face never-ending menu options when calling customer service, and if they want to quickly pick up toiletries, they often find them locked up in cases. A shortage of pharmacists isn’t helping matters, either.

My father was a pharmacist. I am a CVS customer. I worked at a place that hired Disney to create a "great customer experience".

Memo to Tilak Mandadi: Your maddening reliance on technology to solve the problem is the problem, not the solution.

Creating a winning patient experience takes planning and integrated execution throughout your hospital or office. Analytics and data alone won't get you to the promised land. Of course, for a fee, you can take a bunch of online courses and get certified in patient experience, or maybe 1000 threat count sheets on the beds will help.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship