3 Myths About Patient Experience

3 Myths About Patient Experience

The advent of retail-based healthcare services has begun to blur the division between healthcare as service and healthcare as product, with new emphasis being placed on delivery and experience. This will be a game-changer.

Not only does this shift suggest that healthcare organizations will have to rethink what they know as the “healthcare experience”, but also that this experience will be judged against more than just their own industry. So, if differentiation and growth are strategic imperatives for healthcare organizations, intentionally designed patient experiences will be integral to success.

Here are the myths about patient experience you need to ignore:

  1. Patient Experience is the same as Patient Satisfaction.

    Patient satisfaction scores provide little insight into what actually happened during the care experience or how to fix what went wrong — it simply tabulates satisfaction. Service improvement will require experience-specific data to translate feedback into actionable information.

  2. Designing the Patient Experience Requires Large-scale Capital Investment.

    The drivers of an ideal experience tend to be more related to experiential attributes (e.g. sympathy of staff) rather than capital-related issues (e.g. unrestricted visiting hours). To drive growth and overall patient engagement, we must design ways of connecting with patients, families and their support systems on an emotional level.

  3. We Know What Our Patients Want and Need.

    In terms of data, providers know their patients perhaps better than anyone else. But do they understand their patients emotionally? Do they know how to align patient expectations with reality of care delivery? Organizations need to go beyond just data gathering to understand their patients and provide the best possible care.

Healthcare delivery systems are complicated and disjointed; thoughtful experience design can counteract this fragmentation. Future healthcare experiences will be invisible, unobtrusive and easily integrated into people's lives.

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