The healthcare industry has been asking patients how they feel for over a decade. But patient satisfaction surveys only go so far — to really move the needle on the patient experience, it’s time the industry embraced experience management.
We all are in the business of experience. Healthcare is no different. Taking care of patients all day, every day, means we deliver experiences with patients, family members, providers, volunteers - anyone who interacts within our healthcare system.
The high quality, safe, compassionate care we deliver at the lowest cost and/or value is often difficult and something we need to understand and manage closely. As a result, experience management needs to become incorporated into the day to day operations across an organisation.
But what is experience management? Experience Management (XM) is the discipline of using both experience data (X-data) and operational data (O-data) to measure and improve the four core experiences of any business: customer, employee, product and brand.
As healthcare faces the challenge of meeting consumer expectations with a workforce that is being asked to do more with less every day, compounded by an environment of changing regulations, it’s clear our industry must focus on human beings and increase our ability to adapt. This is where the discipline of XM comes into play.
XM enables an organisation to succeed in this environment by enabling them to do three things
1. Continuously Learn - understanding how the experiences you deliver affect all the people (employees, customers, caregivers, etc.) that interact with your organisation. Learning how these experiences impact your brand and culture help you implement processes that address customer service interactions
2. Propagate Insights - put the right information in the right form and in front of the right people to help them make better decisions.
3. Rapidly Adapt - building the capabilities to be able to respond to insights quickly and make changesto improve the experience.
To date, patient satisfaction surveys have been the industry’s primary tool for trying to understand and manage the experiences being delivered — but their impact is limited. To truly transform experiences, it’s time to look beyond patient satisfaction surveys and move towards a more holistic approach to accurately measure and glean insights from timely, role and site-based feedback - and then use these insights to make patients feel known and understood and help systems achieve financial health and improve quality and wellness outcomes.
In healthcare, we have a long history of asking for feedback from our patients and families about their perception of their experience. Recognising that patients and families do not have the clinical training to truly and effectively evaluate the clinical quality of care, asking about their service experience has traditionally been a proxy for a patient’s perception of quality.
Healthcare providers feel constrained when it comes to changing this listening strategy or adding to it in innovative and creative ways. Quite frankly, healthcare providers are stuck and frustrated with their current methodology, yet lost on what to do next. The current patient satisfaction surveys fail to give organisations the right data, at the right time, and in the right form to surface predictive insights that matter most across the patient experience and activate the entire organisation for improved outcomes.
Healthcare needs a different way to continuously listen.
It’s critical to start with clearly identifying the gap that needs to be closed. Gaps exist in experiences when there is a difference between what patients and families expect and what their actual experience looks and feels like.
Depending on your health system’s needs, the issues identified by your patients, and your strategies and goals, you can nimbly listen, adjust, and modify what your listening posts capture to help answer questions about the gaps that exist.
Modern feedback tools are different from the patient satisfaction surveys we have known. Questionnaires can be administered in real-time and are quick to complete. They ask a few insightful questions and are powered by artificial intelligence to create meaningful feedback experiences that strengthen the relationship with your customers (here at Qualtrics, we call this having Smart Conversations).
The approach is facile, so as you learn more about the experiences of the people that matter most (not only your patients and families, but also your staff, providers and communities you serve), you can mold and adjust your data collection to gain deeper understanding. Results are collected on a single platform allowing for deeper analytics and insight delivered in real-time.
Once you have comprehensive experience data (X-data) from a variety of sources, you can begin to layer that data with your operational data (O-data) to transform how this information leads to powerful, clarifying insights.
With your X- and O-data combined, you have the tools to start making improvements with real impact. You know what you need to fix and what impact it will have on your most important metrics, whether it’s patient satisfaction, clinical outcomes, or business metrics like revenue and profit. By prioritising your investments in effectively measuring patient experience, you gain the insights you need to demonstrate the impact of your improvements across the organisation.
This is what XM looks like. As you strengthen the discipline of XM across your organisation, you develop habits of continuously listening, propagating insights and rapidly adapting, ultimately improving experiences.
For more information about how healthcare providers can move beyond the norm to better listen to patients, healthcare workers, and clinicians to drive maximum impact Watch webinar series - Prioritising healthcare in a world of change.
