What is patient experience and how to improve patient experience?

When one hears ‘patient experience’, they automatically think of the experience of the patient with their doctor. While this criteria,without any doubt, reigns supreme over any,it is surely not the only one which would ensure a holistic patient experience.

With all the chaos that ensued with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the focus has now shifted from just a good doctor-patient experience to providing patients with a feeling of safety and security. Creating an atmosphere where patients have a pleasant experience is a very important aspect and is the responsibility of healthcare providers.

From the time a patient engages with your business in any capacity to the time they leave your medical practice, having the guarantee of a good experience will help not only solidify patient retention but also demonstrate to the patients that you care.

Patient experience is therefore something all practice owners/healthcare providers should pay utmost attention to. According to a study conducted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, “substantial evidence points to a positive association between various aspects of patient experience, such as good communication between providers and patients, and several important health care processes and outcomes.”

Patient experience encompasses their interaction with the healthcare system.This includes,their interactions with healthcare facilities online, with doctors,nurses,health plans etc.

In this article, we will be discussing what patient experience is, some common issues that hamper patient experience and how to improve patient experience, and the impact of patient experience on your healthcare practice.

Patient experience vs Patient satisfaction

Though often used interchangeably, patient experience and patient satisfaction signify different meanings. While patient experience is the sum of all interactions, shaped by an organization’s culture that influence patient perceptions across the continuum of care, patient satisfaction is a measure of whether a patient’s expectations regarding his/her experience were met.

Guessing each patient’s expectation and catering to these different expectations might be a difficult task. Ensuring a good patient experience however, is something you can oversee and guarantee. Follow these simple rules to provide your patients with a good experience.

Patient experience Vs Patient engagement

Patient engagement and patient experience differ in what they comprise. Though both revolve around patient satisfaction and patient retention, patient engagement is made of actions and patient experience is made of interactions.

In patient experience and patient engagement, it is critical for the provider to be invested in timely communication with the patient.

Here are some key factors that differentiate patient experience from patient engagement:

Patient Experience	Patient Engagement
The goals of patient experience are to differentiate the brand, exceed patient expectations, and improve health outcomes.	Patient engagement is health care providers look at reducing overall costs, booking easy appointments, and empowering patients in the long run.
Starts from booking an appointment to the time of discharge	Starts from when patients seek information about the health care organization
The means to do this is using patient experience solutions like Emitrr to manage patient reviews, maintain the online brand reputation, and communicate frequently.	The means to engage patients can be through patient portals such as Emitrr to schedule appointments easily, ask questions, pay bills, and more.
Measured using HCAHPS(Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems), patient surveys, online reviews.	Measured using PAM(patient activation measure), PHE(patient health engagement) score.

What are the similarities between patient engagement and patient experience?

There are many common factors between patient engagement and patient experience. Both patient engagement and patient experience are cumulative. A health care provider cannot expect that a single action will result in positive patient engagement or patient experience. Both of them are a collection of events that are interconnected and interlinked. Patient experience includes patient engagement. Patient engagement is the core bridge to patient experience and eventual patient satisfaction. Patient engagement nurtures patient experience. Let us take the help of an example.

If a healthcare provider is looking to improve patient engagement, they need to-

Simplify appointment bookings
Make rescheduling of appointments easier
Submit and collect patient data through various integrated EHR platforms
Maintain online reputation and reviews
Connect with the patient 24/7
Automate appointment reminder systems and response patterns

Ways to improve patient engagement and patient experience

Maintain communication

In many cases patients may not know about the complete treatment and facilities. This may lead them to feel that there is a lack of facilities. The best thing to do here is to improve patient outcomes and patient experience by communicating with them. If a healthcare provider is open about communicating in a kind manner to patients, they can expect better outcomes. Improving communication can mean great things for patients since they know the course of treatment, appointments, and more.

Minimize Response Times

One thing health care providers need to do is reduce response times. You need to ensure that staff members collaborate so that all patient information is readily available. This cross-availability of information will enhance touchpoint management. All patient concerns and feedback must be noted and considered while communicating with them. For example- One patient may prefer text messaging as their preferred mode of response and another might choose emails. Ask them what they prefer and minimize the response times accordingly.

Ensure Hygiene is Excellent

Good medical care facilities need to be synonymous with well-maintained clean places for patients to feel secure. Hygiene is an important aspect of the patient experience. Common areas like waiting for lounge, washrooms, receptions, and visitors gallery need to be clean at all times. This will generate a positive impression of the center. Bad hygiene or dirty places can lead to negative reviews.

Be compassionate

Health care centers also need to be compassionate and display empathy as part of the patient experience. It is important to reassure vulnerable patients by understanding their dilemmas. Bringing the human element is very important to support patients in their testing times. Being kind and good to patients in the facility will ensure they are happy with the experience.

Send reminders and follow-ups

Health care centers must send reminders before an appointment date and follow up after the appointment or test. It is important to communicate with your patients through follow-ups since you are actively involved. This will build their trust in your practice and enhance the patient experience.

Use technology

It is always great if you can use technology to automate patient appointment reminders and obtain reviews. Health care solutions for patient management such as Emitrr allow health care centers to be in control of their patient treatment at all times.

Emitrr allows health care centers to be aware of all appointments, and reminders, and stay engaged with patients via their preferred form. You can be sure of not missing a single call. Post-treatment, you can obtain patient feedback via a patient satisfaction survey. This will help you analyze patient health and their prognosis. Health care providers can also cover aspects and insights of patient experience they need to improve.

Ways to Improve Patient Experience: a journey

Imagine you are a patient looking to go to a healthcare provider. Let’s follow your journey and see how your experience goes and find ways to make your experience better if necessary.

Booking an appointment ; – A potential patient wants to gather information about the practice they’re about to visit. they go to google and do a quick search. Information that you receive during this process will play an important part in the decision making process. Managing online reputation thus becomes an important part of helping patients make a decision. Next, they open a hospital website to confirm the timings and to see whether they can book an appointment online.

Fun Fact : Poor user experience drives almost 50% of users to go with competitors instead

They see that they can indeed book an appointment online and proceed to book a slot for themselves. So far they’re happy because a scheduled appointment means they wouldn’t have to wait a long time to meet up with their doctor. It’s been a while, but they haven’t received a confirmation for their appointment. This frustrates them a bit , so they call the hospital helpline to try and get a confirmation. It’s taking a long time and they seem to get transferred from one department to another, finally they get through to an agent who informs them that their appointment has indeed been confirmed. So while their query has been resolved it took them a long time to get a satisfactory answer. How could this experience have been better?

Provisions for online booking are a great feature that needs to be leveraged properly. Receiving an immediate response on one’s booking is highly desirable. Failure to do so resulted in contacting the helpine where a potential customer will have to to wait an even longer time. All these misfortunes can be avoided by using an AI based answering service which would smartly communicate with the patient. It can give immediate responses on the booking status and solve all patient queries related to scheduling, cancellation, payment etc,.Learn more about how this technology can be leveraged here.

Reaching the Medical Practice – The patient reaches the hospital and go to the waiting area. The employees at the reception seem to be occupied and do not pay heed to the patient .They wanted to inform the employees of their appointment but to no avail. After sometime they walk to the reception and inform the employees about their appointment. Employees say they’ll have to wait because the doctor had an emergency. Obviously it upsets them, because they would have expected to be informed about the same. They decide they have no other choice but to wait. What could have made this better?

Studies have shown that outcome measures focused on improving communication and interaction were more successful than outcome measures focused on changing processes for better patient experience. So training your staff to be courteous and attentive to the patients should be a priority. The patients need to be assured that you are attentive towards them.
With recent times, it is also important that communication about safety standards and rules are also conveyed to the patient. Ensuring that everyone wears a mask and the easy availability of sanitization stations are uncompromisable in a healthcare facility. Ensuring these would instill a feeling of safety in the patients.
News about the unavailability of the doctor or the change in schedule could have also been easily conveyed to the patient in prior by the use of an answering service . Emitrr’s text based 2 way answering service has features to inform patients of such changes.

Meeting the Doctor – The patient is about to meet the doctor but they have to yet again fill a form. Afterwards they meet up with the doctor who asks them some details they just filled up in the form. The doctor keeps the conversation to the point and inquires about their health. He/She doesn’t pay much heed to niceties. What can be improved?

Switching to an online system where patients are able to auto fill their answers would be a good way to try and improve patient experience. If you’re copying or scanning their insurance information into the computer, is it necessary to ask them to hand-write that information on multiple forms?
As discussed earlier, improving communication with the patient is the biggest indicator of good patient experience. Physician-patient relationships can have profound positive and negative implications on clinical care. Stronger physician-patient relationships are correlated with improved patient outcomes. Studies have shown the approach taken by physicians to communicate information is equally important as the actual information that is being communicated. So it is important that doctors take an empathetic and caring approach towards their patients.

Leaving the hospital – The patient is now done with their consultation and start to head home. What can be done to improve their after consultation experience?

The patient is sure to take note of a follow up that has occured after his/her visit. When you call your patient simply to ask how someone is doing after an appointment, it adds to a good patient experience.
Asking patients to leave feedback after they are done with their consultation , would insure him/her that providing them with good patient experience is something you take seriously and that their input is valuable to you. This can again be accomplished by using an automated system like Emitrr that asks patients to rate their experience or leave feedback.

Maintaining a comfortable waiting area where the patients can feel relaxed is also one of the ways which adds to patient experience. Providing some magazines, some eatables and creating a soothing environment can help ease patients.

Now that you’ve had a run through of how a patient experience can look like and how one can improve the experience step by step, let’s look at the impact of this improved patient experience.

What is the impact of increased patient experience?

1. Improved patient engagement.
2.Improves your practice’s reputation.
3. Increased Revenue

Improved Patient Engagement

As discussed above, the days leading up to an appointment with the doctor also play an important role in how patients perceive their experience with your healthcare practice.

The old adage “ Out of sight, out of mind “ should be used as a percusary warning to every practice. One might wonder why is that? Patients often forget that they should make regular appointments with the doctor to keep their health in check. So the onus lies towards the healthcare practice to inculcate this habit of regular checkups in the patients.

Sending reminders days or a week before a scheduled appointment might not do the trick. They do help in ensuring that patients don’t miss an appointment, but what about the first step? i.e scheduling the appointment.

In these cases, it’s important that you keep your patients regularly engaged via other communication methods. By keeping a regular communication line with your patients it shows them that :

a) You have the knowledge and authority to share important information (health related)

b) You care about the patients well being

c) You take delivering important information to your patients seriously

What communication would then help you convey these messages to your patients?
You can schedule well timed Email Marketing or SMS marketing campaigns. These campaigns can include a range of messages you can send through. Newsletters related to health news you think patients should be updated about, important announcements for eg : Insurance policy updates, practice operational changes, etc.

To send such campaigns to your patient list you can use a software like Emitrr. Through the ‘campaigns’ option you will be able to compose a message, choose a list of contacts, and schedule when to send the campaign. Automating the entire process is also an option, by accessing ‘automations’.

Keeping regular communication with patients helps build trust and loyalty with them. These in turn will also significantly improve the patient engagement rates.

Improve your practice’s reputation

As discussed, collecting patient feedback by sending feedback forms to the patients after an appointment is very important. This helps to instill in the patient that you take their feedback seriously and are bent on providing the best experience to them. This, without doubt, needs to be coupled with actionable change according to the feedback received.

When patients become aware of these changes and the effort you put into collecting their feedback, it will help build your practice’s reputation. Your patients will start to speak positively of your practice and directly impact its reputation. One way in which you can ensure that your practice gets to be at the receiving end of this positive feedback is by sending the patients ‘Review links’. The greater the number of reviews you receive online, the more your practice’s reputation will improve.

The places where potential patients will search for a healthcare practice includes, google, facebook etc. To have a good presence on Google, you must have a Google My Business up and running. Learn how you can set up your gmb listing here. Having a significant number of reviews on a trusted platform such as Google, will drive a lot of potential patients to your practice. Similarly, Facebook is another platform where people go to get trusted recommendations from friends and family. It’s a good idea to collect reviews on your practice’s facebook page as well.

Increased Revenue

When patients are satisfied by their experience with your healthcare practice they will continue to make visits whenever necessary.

Fun Fact – In one of the patient surveys, over 70% respondents said that their loyalty to a healthcare practice is tied to their most recent practice visit.

So if you succeed in providing a good patient experience, you are also solidifying patient loyalty.

Word of mouth referrals are considered the strongest drivers of new business, and when your existing patients are satisfied with their experience in your practice they will suggest it to their friends and family resulting in increased revenue mediums.

Conclusion

As you can see, the impact of good patient experience is quite significant. Every practice should make sure that they take comprehensive steps in ensuring good patient experience. Not only will it have an immediate effect but it will also help you in the long run.

What is patient experience?

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