If your healthcare organization has invested in resources to provide great end-to-end experiences across channels, count yourself lucky. You are ahead of the curve.
More likely, you’re in one of the many that are failing to recognize rising consumer expectations or understand the real day-to-day experiences of patients and their caregivers.
We talk to health system leaders regularly and find many believe passionately in how important the experience is (they can often relate as a consumer!), but they don’t see a push to think of patient experience (PX) like outside industry customer experience (CX) – let alone make comparable investments in improving the experience. It’s time to change that.
Consumer Expectations Are Shaping Healthcare Expectations
Travel and retail experiences have reshaped consumer expectations across all industries, including healthcare. Patients think of themselves as customers, expect to be treated as such, and lose trust when they have bad experiences. Patients may trust their doctor but not the system.
NTT Data asked more than 1,000 consumers about their digital healthcare expectations and found that 59% expect their digital healthcare experience to be similar to retail but in reality they’re unable to accomplish the tasks they want to do online. QuestionPro repeated this question in an online poll with 300 consumers this October and 82% stated they expect it to be as easy as retail. One in two consumers want to see to include accessing health records, searching for a doctor/specialists and estimating costs healthcare experiences improve digitally.
The bar has been raised for hospitals to focus on hospitality. (Afterall the two words share a common origin from the Latin word hospes, meaning “guest” or “stranger.”) In a 2023 interview with Boston University School of Hospitality Administration, Geisinger Chief Patient Experience Officer Greg Burke (MD, FACP) noted, “Healthcare has experienced a diminishment of trust.” A part of his goal is to restore trust and reestablish confidence, as he explained, “Hospitals should be more hospitable than Ritz Carlton…reducing suffering and making people feel loved.”
Broaden Understanding to the End-to-End Experience
Remolding the patient as the guest is a mind shift.
It’s a mind shift that requires understanding patients’ changing expectations and unmet needs. Most health systems don’t know the experience patients are having from beginning to end – they’re not gathering or analyzing enough data to understand the end-to-end experience or creating experience-led strategies fueled by human-centered design.
For example, most healthcare CEOs likely couldn’t tell you how patients feel about their mobile app or contact center in terms of finding a doctor, scheduling care, estimating costs, getting financial assistance, or helping patients understand their bill. Administrators might defer to their team tackling HCAHPS measures – but many patient touchpoints aren’t considered using this methodology.
A new journey study by RevealHX measured experience across the end-to-end customer journey and found that only 61% of consumers trust that their hospital/health system has their best interest at heart.
So, what’s lacking? Consumers don’t find navigating care easy. The RevealHX study found that just over half of respondents found it easy to do core tasks like estimate costs or get questions answered about a bill (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Benchmarks Ratings for Ease across Healthcare Touchpoints
| How would you rate the overall ease of the following on a scale of 1-10? | Avg American (top box rating) |
|---|---|
| Scheduling appointments | 74% |
| Knowing what the insurer will cover | 70% |
| Being able to access a hospital representative by email/chat | 62% |
| Understanding what is owed on the bill | 69% |
| Understanding costs | 67% |
| Paying a bill | 67% |
| Knowing when to expect a bill | 64% |
| Getting questions answered by Customer Service after a bill | 59% |
| Working with someone for financial help | 54% |
| Estimating costs | 54% |
Source: www.revealhx.com
Health systems have been focused on patient experience for decades. Feedback is predominantly fed to leadership via HCAHPS results, which doesn’t capture the entire experience but is widely considered THE source of truth. The HCAHPS measurement methodology offers a rear-review mirror on specific aspects of the experience only. It also doesn’t include the perspective of family members’ caregiving and navigating the care of loved ones.
Healthcare Needs to Learn from Other Industries
If customers are comparing their healthcare experiences to experiences in other industries, healthcare companies need to broaden their aperture, too.
This HCAHPS-fueled patient experience definition is narrow compared to the experience practice scope in other industries, where CX pros have proven the return on experience and provided new intel to fuel cost savings, improved revenue, and customer retention.
This means measuring the end-to-end experience.
X = limited to no voice of the customer benchmarks and insightsIt’s time for healthcare leaders to level up and learn from experience efforts across industries. This means measuring the full customer journey.
For some specific insight, we talked to experience leaders who started their careers in other industries and transitioned to healthcare over the last five years. The top advice: Focus on building trust, creating service as a culture, and relentlessly listen to the voice of the customer (patient and beyond).
After serving in CX roles at Ritz-Carlton, Wells Fargo, and ChenMed, Jamey Lutz moved to healthcare in 2020. He reflected, “When I think about any service in any industry, if I don’t trust the organization, the product or service, I’ll just go somewhere else. There are a lot of commonalities across industries. Service is service, right? People share a deep-seated desire to be known and feel like they matter. Maybe patients aren’t high wealth, like at a Ritz hotel, looking to get a great experience for a weekend, but they still want to feel valued and appreciated by those who serve them.”
Jeff Logan, President of Pelorus and past CX leader at US Bank, Anthem BCBS, and Providence Health System, stepped from banking to healthcare in 2020. He shared that, “Healthcare often feels outdated when it comes to customer engagement. While they excel at diagnosing and treating illness, there’s a noticeable gap in treating patients as whole individuals, especially in handling the administrative and interpersonal aspects of care. Healthcare organizations often lack a thoughtful approach to engaging with patients and their caregivers. What struck me most is the assumption that people inherently need them, when in reality, they need to actively attract, engage and retain their customers.”
How to Modernize PX and Path to CX for Growth
It’s time for healthcare to catch up to customer expectations and the customer experience bar set by other industries. Our advice as you path or transition from a PX focus to broader CX culture:
- Partner with your Analytics team to quantify CX. Measure the value in reducing cost of service, improving revenue, reducing attrition, reducing churn, and closing health disparities. Based on our experience, CX is your growth engine.
- Engage your c-suite to foster a culture where insights drive action. Insights have no value without action. They should always be leveraged to fuel desired outcomes.
- Create a CX scorecard with standardized real-time omni-channel metrics. With data sensors across digital and contact center transactions, teams will identify and quantify friction points. New business intel aids in prioritizing fixes and reimagining services, ultimately improving digital first.
- Provide real-time access to the insights. Marry data from operations and financials with feedback and behavioral data to elicit the full picture.
- Expand your service recovery efforts beyond HCAHPS. Include proactive outreach based on sensors across channels and social media.
- Broaden listening to include sentiment from family members and healthcare workers. Caregivers have unique experiences that need to be understood. And frontline staff are key witnesses to the obstacles patients encounter and can flag early indicators to experience challenges.
- Leverage outside-industry playbooks instead of reinventing CX. Learn from companies like Delta, American Express, Amazon, and Uber. Customer voice is a bonafide competitive advantage. They listen to understand and build the future of their business around their customers’ needs and wants.
To build trust and transform healthcare, start with putting the customer at the center of the solution. Without this commitment, the opportunity to deliver meaningful, lasting change will be lost.
At Cortico-X, we help healthcare organizations unlock the full potential of customer-centric strategies every day. Contact us to explore how we can elevate your patient experience and drive growth for your business.
Robyn Gilson
is a Vice President at Cortico-X and leads our Healthcare practice. Robyn applies extensive industry experience and a passion for patient experience to help clients reimagine the art of the art of the possible in the Healthcare industry.
Dani Dudek
is a Principal at Cortico-X with extensive industry experience as a Client Experience leader. Dani has a passion for solving complex business problems and improving people’s lives through exceptional experiences.
Emily Young
is a Principal at Cortico-X with experience in healthcare, life sciences, government, and consumer products.
