As patient expectations evolve, many healthcare organizations are experimenting with new ways to increase engagement, loyalty and trust between patients and providers.
During a May 26 virtual roundtable sponsored by athenahealth as part of the Becker's Hospital Review 11th Annual Meeting, two executive directors of product management at athenahealth — Joe Lopez and Curtis Sherbo — facilitated a discussion about the changing healthcare landscape and what organizations are doing to improve both the patient and provider experience.
Four key takeaways:
1. To streamline and strengthen the patient experience, healthcare organizations must focus on factors like convenience and empowerment. When patients trust their providers and are engaged with the practice, they tend to be more involved in their care. A positive patient experience is based on several factors, such as continuous engagement around well-being, convenience of scheduling visits and more. "A lot can be done around convenience," Mr. Lopez said. "It's about driving time savings and patient empowerment. That builds trusted relationships between patients and providers and creates more efficiency and effectiveness for all parties." Financial considerations are also a less obvious, but important, factor that can influence the patient experience. "Clarifying and paying medical bills are things that are required of the patient that can drive their overall experience," Mr. Sherbo said. "How can we simplify those processes and make it easier for patients to manage their health?"
2. Many healthcare systems are striving to optimize the "human" experience, not just the "patient" experience. "Patients, physicians and staff are at the center of what we do. We don't even call it 'patient experience' anymore. We call it the 'human experience,'" the chief experience officer at one California-based healthcare system noted.
Another healthcare organization that operates across six states in the West and Southwest has adopted a promise for both patients and caregivers that centers on "know me, care for me, ease my way." "If we make the caregiver experience a good one, our patients will also have a good experience," the executive director of customer experience said.
3. For some providers, telehealth requires a different approach to creating an outstanding patient experience. "For visits in the clinic," the director of virtual care at a Detroit-based integrated health system said, "we've built care team workflows that ensure providers have an efficient visit. Someone rooms the patient, does the med and allergy checks and gets everything teed up in advance. In some departments, that team approach didn't translate into virtual [appointments] and providers were put on an island to do it all themselves. Opportunities exist to make the virtual visit patient experience more seamless." The pivot to virtual caregiving has also been challenging in terms of scheduling. Many providers have found themselves with back-to-back telehealth appointments. Working at their computers with no breaks has led to neck pain, back pain and other problems.
4. Healthcare organizations are constantly looking for new ways to engage patients during virtual and face-to-face visits. "Before COVID-19, we had patients and families sitting with us at the decision-making table," the senior vice president and chief experience officer at a health system serving the Philadelphia area said. "Now we're bringing them back in a virtual format so their voices are included at the most critical decision-making points." Co-design efforts are also a top business objective at a Seattle-based healthcare system. "Shared decision-making is very important at the individual visit level," the senior director of patient experience said. "We must listen, understand and take action from a systemic perspective and then build the necessary structures and processes."