How to Improve Patient Experience: 10 Proven Strategies that Work
Discover how to improve the patient experience with 10 proven strategies from providers just like you.
OVERVIEW: Knowing how to improve patient experience is essential to thrive in tomorrow’s healthcare economy. Value-based care models, technology, and patient expectations are urging us to shift how we think about patient satisfaction and solicit, collect, analyze, and address patient reviews and feedback. As AI takes hold, we can expect more changes ahead.
This article helps healthcare organizations and patient experience leaders learn how to improve patient experience in a consumer-centric healthcare environment. In it, we share 10 strategies to enhance the patient experience through personalized communication and data-driven decision-making.
Read on to see how prioritizing hyper-personalized patient engagement enhances care quality, drives new revenue, bolsters branding, and creates lasting and loyal patient advocates.
The Changing Patient Experience Paradigm.
How has your business changed since the beginning of 2020? If you’re like many healthcare organizations, your operations look drastically different thanks to a steady stream of administrative, staffing, financial, and care delivery changes.
Patient expectations have evolved, too.
The pandemic years drove digital personalization innovations that transformed the consumer experience. Today, you can find your new favorite television show in seconds while ordering your groceries for next-day delivery. Giving feedback to Netflix or Instacart is as easy as scrolling or clicking a button. Along the way, your preferences are tracked, and you’re served up even more relevant content in the future.
That’s why today’s average consumer expects service experiences that are reliable, convenient, relevant, and meaningful. They want the same from their healthcare providers.
The “patient experience” is much more than a post-discharge quality survey today. The ideal is a genuinely patient-centric organization with a loyal patient base, reduced clinician burnout, high-quality care, and strong patient and community satisfaction.
Yet, despite the benefits, many healthcare organizations can feel stuck when thinking about how to improve patient experience in healthcare.
What Makes a Great Patient Experience?
Over the past decade, most healthcare organizations have adopted a patient experience strategy with one-size-fits-all patient satisfaction and engagement techniques.
Despite healthcare’s best efforts, patient satisfaction continues to decline.
Our data show organizations across the care continuum are missing the mark on patient expectations. We also found that employees feel dissatisfied with their patient interactions and wish they had more quality time to spend with patients.
The future, however, is consumer-centric.
We should be thinking about enhancing the patient experience in healthcare as a business imperative. Here’s why:
1. Value-based care requires high-quality healthcare experiences
As value-based care models take hold, you need to be ready to demonstrate how your patient engagement contributes to better outcomes.
2. Improving patients’ experience improves reimbursement.
Whole-person, value-based care models are rapidly replacing fragmented, fee-for-service healthcare encounters. Patient satisfaction is a key performance indicator for value-based care. Thus, healthcare organizations that drive better patient experience are more likely to receive higher reimbursement from payors. This should come as a relief for healthcare organizations with razor-thin margins.
3. You need rich patient feedback to drive your business decisions.
Yes, that’s right. The patient’s wants and needs should drive your operational decisions, not the other way around. Rich patient feedback and insights help you determine where to focus, what to change, where to market, and how to grow.
Until now, we’ve treated the patient experience as an ancillary goal, secondary to providing exemplary clinical outcomes. In a value-based care world with consumers who have a choice, we must see the patient experience as a critical factor in driving better outcomes and practice growth.
Where to Begin: How to Improve Your Patient Experience in a Consumer-Centric World
Transforming the patient experience is a continually-evolving strategy for your practice. There are a few common areas where healthcare organizations can improve.
How do we know? We’ve heard from the patients themselves.
Earlier this year, we combed through two million de-identified patient surveys to help healthcare organizations understand more about their patients’ wants and needs.
Here’s where patients are feeling most frustrated (and, perhaps, where your patient experience strategic plan could focus):
1. Billing practices confuse patients.
Patients reported feeling confused about their healthcare bills—a learning opportunity for both providers and health insurers. Many patients worried about what was owed, to whom, and when. Others were frustrated with the administrative headaches of trying to solve billing issues.
2. Wait times are increasing as access wanes.
Last year, patients were most dissatisfied with their access to care. Scheduling, phone holds, wait periods, prior authorizations, and even wayfinding exacerbated patient frustration.
3. Patients don’t feel heard—inside or outside of the exam room.
Clinicians have approximately eight minutes to build rapport with patients and gather essential clinical details for assessment, diagnosis, and care planning. That leaves little time for questions, discussion, and strategy. Many also reported feeling disconnected from their doctor’s office between visits.
How to Improve Patient Experience in Healthcare? 10 Proven Strategies to Improve Patient Experience.
These dynamics put you—our patient experience leaders—in a tough spot. We understand it can feel hard to prioritize patient experience best practices. You’re worried about tomorrow’s urgent pressures like finances and staffing shortages. Thankfully, there are some concrete strategies you can implement now that will make a difference. And they all start with data.
Here are 10 strategies to improve patient experience:
1. Build a patient-led culture.
The best patient experience starts with building a culture and a patient experience improvement strategy where feedback is embraced, valued, and implemented. The patient experience universe should be 360-degree in nature, considering attitudes, behaviors, actions, questions, and comments from all stakeholders: patients, families, caregivers, and clinicians alike.
“Our patient and team members’ experiences should mirror one another. Making sure employees’ voices are heard is key to driving consistency around care delivery. We spend as much time on team experience as we do for employees.” – Chief Patient Experience Officer, Multi-State Healthcare Network
2. Design a patient experience strategic plan.
Design your engagement strategies around your patients as individuals. Use the data to give them the healthcare experience they seek. If you ask the strategic questions, they’ll tell you their wants and needs.
Examples of patient experience goals in a consumer-centric organization:
- What is the most efficient and effective way to cater to specific individuals?
- How can we engage with patients to truly learn what they need and serve them better?
- How can we gain patient trust, business, loyalty, and advocacy?
- How can we build a brand reflective of our patients’ and communities’ needs?
3. Listen. Patients want to be heard.
And you need to know: What do patients truly need from your practice to live well? If you give patients the space, they will tell you what they like, want, and need. Your goal is to understand and to do that; you must listen carefully. You’ll find valuable insights from what you hear.
4. Prioritize hyper-personalization.
Patients are human, just like you. Interact with and speak to them like they’re humans. Even better, design a patient experience strategic plan that engages them as individuals. Create an experience where they feel heard, seen, and valued. Here are a few tips:
– Find the right formats and channels.
Give patients the opportunity to share feedback on their time and in their preferred format. For example, short, text-based surveys with space for comments work well for today’s busy patients.
– Craft personalized surveys and questions that engage.
Create concise, targeted surveys with appropriate follow-up questions to get the feedback you need to improve experiences and make meaningful changes.
– Think free-form.
Use timely, short surveys sent via text with an option to add comments, so you can hear from patients in their own words. Don’t worry about analyzing those free-text comments manually—we can help with that.
Don’t know what to ask your patients? We compiled a list of the 10 most effective patient experience questions. Download it here: https://info.feedtrail.com/top-10-patient-experience-survey-questions
5. Discover rich insights, trends, and surprises about your practice.
Deep and actionable insights about the patient experience are crucial for achieving customer centricity. Feedtrail can help you get to the root of business issues and opportunities related to patient interactions.
Case-in-point: Cedars-Sinai’s emergency department team learned the most effective way to boost satisfaction scores wasn’t to hire more people to shorten patient wait times. It was to make their wait more pleasant. See why: https://www.feedtrail.com/cedars-sinai-ed/
6. Celebrate the positive feedback.
Use patient experience data to show employees how they positively impact patients’ lives. Star performers’ best practices should be celebrated and adopted organization wide.
“The feedback we get from patients via Feedtrail enables our nurse leaders to connect with specific team members in real time and pass on the compliments, contributing to improved morale and teamwork.” Claude Stang, Executive Director, Emergency Department, Cedars Sinai
7. Address not-so-great feedback promptly.
Conversely, make sure your processes can help you salvage less-than-desirable experiences as soon as they happen. Service recovery can help retain patients who might have otherwise lapsed. Here’s some advice:
– Follow up—promptly.
Quickly follow up with patients that report less than ideal experiences to turn things around.
– Start a conversation.
Using Feedtrail’s text-based surveys, patients can request a response to their feedback.
– Empower employees to problem solve.
Make sure your internal processes can help you salvage less-than-desirable experiences before you lose a patient or get a negative review. The right workflows can alert the appropriate team members about issues immediately so they can act swiftly to resolve problems.
8. Review feedback regularly.
Make reviewing feedback a part of your organizational operations. Everyone in the organization impacts the patient experience and should be committed to gathering feedback for improvement and growth.
“We make it a priority for our patients’ voices to be heard. Our value-based care programs have a huge patient experience component. We analyze feedback institutionally, beginning every meeting by reviewing patient feedback. [It’s a way to help the team] know how valuable it is when patients are satisfied.” – Leslie Nestor, Assistant EVMS Medical Group Quality Officer at Eastern Virginia Medical Group (EVMS)
9. Close the loop.
When patients take the time to give feedback, thank them. To make them feel heard, go one step further. Show them how their feedback has been implemented. If a patient’s valuable feedback about wait times has helped you improve the experience in the waiting room, let your patients know where the idea came from. You’ll engender trust and encourage others to feel comfortable sharing their experiences.
10. Learn and evolve.
The patient experience strategy of the future is ever-evolving. It has to be: people are always changing and so, too, are their experiences and expectations. Make sure your patient experience strategy and technology is built to truly understand people over time. AI-enabled patient experience software that “learns” and communicates with patients as individuals can go a long way.
How to make the most of your patient experience data.
You have valuable patient experience data—there’s never been a better time to use it!
Healthcare organizations that excel in patient experience give patients the opportunity to share their experiences, react to feedback, and quickly resolve issues — all in real time. However, we know your team’s time is limited. That’s where AI (and Feedtrail) can help.
Consider AI-enabled patient experience tools to help you collect and analyze patient feedback in real time. Our patient experience software has sophisticated artificial and business intelligence capabilities to help you:
- Grow patient satisfaction as you gather and learn more about your patients’ wants and needs over time.
- Foster real-time personalized engagement with hyper-personalized and predictive engagement surveys, questions, tools, and communication strategies.
- Drive quality care as you understand and become more intelligent about individual patient feedback, rather than generic benchmarks.
- Optimize efficiency and brand reputation as you discover new patient perspectives about where you can improve operationally.
- Build patient loyalty through predictive patient experience modeling, will help you create the ideal experience for your ideal patient.
- Gain new revenue and competitive advantage as patients see your positive review and commitment to experience excellence.
Enhance patient experience with Feedtrail.
Ready to elevate your patient experience? Let’s connect.
About Christine Serafin, Customer Success: Meet Christine, a results-driven Customer Success Manager at Feedtrail with extensive expertise in implementing software solutions, especially in the SaaS realm. Her organizational skills excel in seamlessly aligning software implementations with organizational objectives. With a background in project management, training, and customer satisfaction, she brings a proactive and versatile approach to ensure the successful integration of cutting-edge software solutions. Christine is passionately dedicated to the success of Feedtrail’s customers, enhancing their patient experience through innovative software solutions.