Creating unique human understanding with Virtua Health and NRC Health

Data that provide visibility into the patient experience, such as patient stories and metrics that capture patient sentiments, are crucial to understanding the healthcare user and creating compelling, patient loyalty-enhancing internal and external messaging.

During a September Becker's Hospital Review podcast sponsored by NRC Health, June Captain, associate vice president of customer strategy at NRC Health, and Ryan Younger, vice president of marketing at Virtua Health, discussed effective approaches to making care delivery and marketing more patient-focused.

Three key insights were:

1. Effective marketing and storytelling have many useful functions in healthcare organizations. Internally, they help raise staff morale by sharing patient experiences of compassionately delivered care; externally, they improve brand recognition and drive word-of-mouth referrals.
   
   Organizations that listen to patient concerns and market themselves in ways that resonate with those concerns are also better equipped to make their physicians and services discoverable by the people who need them. "I think of marketing as connecting," Mr. Younger said. "It's how we help the organization understand what matters most to our customers and how we help people understand what services might be right for them."
   
   
2. Understanding and addressing what matters most to patients starts with using the right metrics. The metric that NRC Health believes best reflects the patient experience and can best illuminate the path forward for organizations — which it calls the human understanding metric — is the answer to the question: "Did everyone on the care team treat you as a unique person?" 
   
   "We've been able to tie that metric to loyalty," Ms. Captain said. "When a person says that they've had a unique experience, they're 12 times more likely to be a promoter of your organization than someone that doesn't feel like they were treated as a unique individual."
   
   NRC helps organizations conduct focus groups to capture those responses and the sentiments behind them. Organizations are then empowered to share the stories with their local communities, which helps augment brand recognition and patient loyalty.
   
   
3. Shaping the patient experience is everyone's job. Patients experience many clinical and non-clinical touchpoints along their healthcare journey and everyone involved in that journey — from the parking lot attendant to the medical personnel to the support, IT and facilities staff to even the health insurance provider — has an impact on the final overall impression.
   
   Sometimes this is not well understood by team leaders, who tend to focus on ensuring that their department does not commit errors, but too often neglect that cross-departmental and cross-functional collaboration around what's truly necessary. To correct that tendency, organizations that are aiming to improve the patient experience can follow these three steps:
   
   
   1. Gain commitment and buy-in from top leadership.
      
      
   2. Facilitate conversations internally to map out the entire patient journey, from before patients set foot into the facility to post-treatment follow-up.
      
      
   3. Implement systems that collect and analyze data related to the patient experience.

"Every organization is highly capable [of this] because of its people, who got into the healthcare profession for a reason," Mr. Younger said. "That should be enough to get started and carve out this space as a priority."