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Designing and implementing exceptional patient experiences must be a priority focus for any healthcare organization. Many patients equate their patient experience with a customer experience they might have with a consumer brand or retailer. And if they aren’t satisfied with their healthcare provider’s approach to their individual needs, they will look elsewhere for care options — whether that’s switching to a different doctor or establishing a relationship with another health system.
Delivering an exceptional patient experience is the path to earning patients’ trust and loyalty. The ability to make the healthcare experience a human experience helps healthcare providers build a strong brand and reputation — and drive revenue. It also leads to better health outcomes for patients, including enhanced patient safety.
In this blog post, we’ll look at aspects of the patient care experience, including various factors that can influence those experiences. We’ll also examine the roles that healthcare providers can play in shaping a positive experience for patients. We’ll also discuss how the use of technology in healthcare — in particular, artificial intelligence (AI) — can help healthcare organizations better understand how to improve the patient experience.
First, let’s talk more about what patient experiences are, and why it is important for healthcare professionals to create personalized experiences for patients.
Patients are consumers of healthcare. As such, they have high expectations about receiving high-quality, patient-centered care that makes them feel valued. Healthcare is very personal, and patients want their healthcare providers to treat them as individuals.
Patient experiences occur at all points of interaction between healthcare businesses and people seeking their services. Appointment scheduling by phone or online, in-office consultations with healthcare professionals, testing and the delivery of results, and hospital admittance and discharge processes are just some examples of these many diverse touch points.
Patients want to receive care from a clinic, visit a physician or dentist, or elect surgery at a hospital that they trust and believe emphasizes patient-centered care. They want to feel confident that they will experience patient satisfaction and receive quality services when using their valuable health insurance benefits or paying out-of-pocket costs to a particular health system or provider.
The type of patient care experience that healthcare professionals provide can directly shape patient (i.e., customer) loyalty. To underscore further why the patient experience is important, consider this hypothetical example with two scenarios. Which one would you choose if you were the patient?
After researching online reviews of local dentists, a prospective patient calls to make an appointment at a nearby dental office:
It’s a good bet that most people would prefer the experience outlined in Scenario #2. There’s even a strong chance that this dentist could still earn the patient’s business in the future. That’s less likely to happen in the first scenario, where the patient experience is far from seamless or personalized.
Patient experiences matter even at the earliest stages of an interaction between a patient and provider. Healthcare businesses can attract new patients by demonstrating from the outset that they are focused on patient satisfaction.
Similarly, healthcare providers can forge long-term relationships with patients by ensuring they provide positive experiences at every touch point along the patient journey, no matter how routine. It follows that improving the patient experience can help healthcare providers to drive stable revenue. Satisfied patients are likely to be repeat customers — and provide predictable income to the healthcare organizations to which they entrust their care.
The interactions that healthcare professionals have with a patient have a direct impact on the patient experience, of course. That’s true whether that professional is a doctor, nurse, technician, pharmacist, or payment processor in the hospital billing office. Here’s a closer look at some types of relationships in the healthcare setting where providing a positive experience not only can improve patient satisfaction but also impact health outcomes.
Doctors have a major role to play in shaping exceptional patient experiences. According to the American Association of Family Practitioners (AAFP), doctors can enhance patient experiences by being more accessible to patients. This can include expanding visit options, such as Saturday or evening hours, using pre-visit planning to make visits more efficient, and making the effort to involve patients more directly in their care decision-making.
Doctors can also improve the patient experience by emphasizing patient safety, communicating plainly instead of using “medical speak,” and giving patients written summaries of their visits. Even something as simple as speaking gently to and face-to-face with a patient about even the most routine care can improve the overall patient experience.
Nurses engage with patients as much as — and often, even more than — doctors in delivering patient care, so their role in shaping the patient experience is at least as equally as important. And enhancing the patient experience is just as straightforward for nurses.
A 2022 survey by healthcare company Press Ganey found that patients valued nurses who treated them with respect, listened to their concerns, were responsive, and clearly explained medicines, conditions, and treatments. In short, these nurses focus on providing a human experience when caring for patients.
Administrative staff, such as medical receptionists, are often the first point of contact for patients —either in-person or over the phone. So, healthcare staff must be well-trained and understand the importance of being courteous, empathetic, and informative in their communication with patients.
Even if administrative and ancillary staff in a healthcare organization don’t come into direct contact with patients, they can still play a crucial role in helping healthcare professionals and healthcare systems deliver a positive patient experience.
The patient’s healthcare environment also plays a role in their overall experience. No patient wants to spend hours, let alone days, in a depressing or uncomfortable environment, especially when they are trying to recover from an illness or injury, surgery, or treatment.
Hospitals, clinics, and even medical offices should emphasize patient safety, but also be comfortable and welcoming. They should have ample space, good airflow, and ideally, natural light — as well as bright, functional artificial light.
Waiting rooms should be clean and tidy as well as hygienic. It’s also important to provide patients with access to water, coffee, tea, and even light snacks, as wait times can sometimes be long. Plants or aquariums can also brighten up any healthcare environment and create a calming effect.
Patient experiences are complex and multidimensional. Illness, or the need for treatment, can produce emotions like fear, sadness, resentment, and anger that must be acknowledged and managed by clinical staff. Qualities and abilities like empathy and active listening are key for healthcare professionals to demonstrate. So, too, is the ability to communicate with patients, who must process detailed information about their care and make informed decisions.
Lastly, and most importantly, there is the clinical aspect of the patient experience. Surgery and treatment can be debilitating and highly stressful. Healthcare staff must closely monitor patients during treatment, ensure patient safety, and give adequate information and follow-up for post-surgical care to ensure the patient experience is a positive one in all aspects.
Technology is playing a big part throughout healthcare, including in healthcare providers’ efforts to provide a consistent and positive patient experience. The following are three key areas where technology is leading healthcare organizations forward on this front.
Telemedicine, also known as telehealth (or telecare in some European countries) deploys digital telecommunication technology including video to allow healthcare professionals to interact with patients remotely. Telemedicine has been around as a technology since the 1960s but rose to prominence during the recent global pandemic. It has obvious value for patients who live far from hospitals or doctors’ offices or are unable to leave their homes.
According to Pew Research, 85% of American adults own a smartphone. This has contributed to an explosive growth in the availability of mobile health (mHealth) apps since 2015. A 2019 Australian study cites more than 350,000 mHealth apps available for download. As a result, more and more patients are embracing apps, including wearables like fitness trackers that monitor heart rate and conditions such as diabetes.
These technologies have been, and will continue to be, instrumental in promoting positive, healthy behavior — thereby reducing hospital readmissions while enhancing the patient experience.
Artificial intelligence is transforming the healthcare industry. AI has multiple applications for use throughout healthcare from research and drug discovery and testing to medical analysis, advanced detection of disease, and business process improvement functions — like making operating rooms more efficient.
The deployment of AI throughout healthcare organizations has the potential to dramatically improve patient health outcomes and create exceptional patient experiences. For example: Conversation analytics powered by AI can capture, generate, and analyze mountains of data from simple, day-to-day phone interactions between patients and their healthcare providers.
Analytical tools such as Invoca’s HIPAA-compliant Signal AI detect patterns in data and provide intelligence that healthcare professionals can use to enhance the patient experience. Invoca’s healthcare clients have used this technology to scale better call experiences across multiple healthcare facilities and locations and develop more efficient systems for appointment scheduling.
The patient journey today is an omnichannel experience incorporating online, analog, and personal interaction. Yet, a significant portion of the overall patient experience still occurs over the phone, despite the recent growth in online scheduling.
While most healthcare consumers research healthcare providers online, they typically convert by calling. Patients also pick up the phone to tap advice from nurses, obtain test results, and ask scheduling questions.
Here’s how some simple best practices can elevate your phone system and enhance the patient experience your healthcare organization provides:
Most consumers say they want personalization in healthcare, so it is important to provide it across all the channels your patients use to interact with your healthcare operation.
AI can help with the process. Invoca’s conversation intelligence software, for example, can create a seamless patient experience by using data from the caller’s online journey to intelligently route calls to the most appropriate location or specialist from the get-go. No more risk of current or prospective patients being bounced around from department to department.
Conversation intelligence can further smooth the omnichannel patient journey by detecting issues with the patient experience. Here’s an example: Call data analysis can help a healthcare system understand that patients visiting the provider’s website are referencing incomplete or confusing information about insurance coverage. The incomplete information can be corrected quickly and enhanced to create seamless experiences for future patients.
Finally, Invoca’s ability to connect the digital-to-call journey can improve the overall patient experience. How? By communicating the caller’s reason for reaching out before a healthcare specialist or agent picks up the phone.
Invoca PreSense captures data from the caller’s digital journey solution and passes it along to the call recipient so that they may greet patients personally and be prepared for the ensuing conversation. Patients don’t have to explain why they are calling, and the conversation can move straight to resolving the reason for the call, saving the patient (and the healthcare provider) valuable time.
Why is the patient experience important? It is a critical component of patient-centered care — and the quadruple aim of healthcare systems performance. It leads to improved clinical experiences, better patient outcomes, lower costs, and more. That’s why creating exceptional patient experiences is an ongoing process of innovation for healthcare providers and medical professionals.
There’s much more to creating an exceptional and sustainable patient experience than being empathetic, delivering quality care, and providing a superior environment for patients to receive care. Healthcare organizations that take a holistic and future-forward view toward the patient experience know that they also need to make the patient’s journey as smooth as possible — and that means using advanced technology to create a seamless transition between online and offline interactions.
Invoca’s conversation intelligence solution enables healthcare organizations to bridge that gap and gain a complete picture of the patient journey. This ability to trace the entire journey gives healthcare marketers access to the full array of customer information. What’s more, the data can be quickly analyzed at scale using AI-powered tools, and turned into actionable insight that can be applied in delivering exceptional patient experiences.
To learn more about how to improve the patient experience today and in the future with Invoca’s conversation intelligence platform, book a customized demo for your healthcare organization now.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you deliver top-notch patient experiences? Check out these resources:
