25 Ways to Improve the Healthcare Customer Experience

Patients are consumers and customers. Those customers experience our brand in many ways, digital and physical. I’ll be using the term “customer” here as a catchall for patients and consumers the way other verticals like finance, hospitality, and retail do. Customers include patients we work to retain and consumers who have yet to make a choice. 

1. Define a Chief Experience Officer role. Culture is what we incentivize. Prioritizing the customer experience by defining a resource provides incentive. Ask any healthcare employee if they prioritize patient experience and we will all tell you yes. The daily ability to execute on the work to meet that priority often comes second to immediacy. The immediacy of filling the obligations of your role (operations, clinic management, financial services) supersedes customer experience.The person in this role will do the work to bridge the systems that got fractured in the digital age. 

2. Hire a Chief Experience Officer. Don’t build separate, siloed projects to improve customer experience without the vision of a Chief Experience Officer.

3. Define the primary customer touch points and experiences (digital and physical). Mapping all of the customer experiences, forces us to recognize how many disparate teams are responsible for those experiences. Journeys are touched by many teams, but we’re not always incentivized to plan around the full journey. We each have our part on disparate teams based on hierarchy or departments and we don’t always look at the full customer experience together.

4. Launch an AI/chatbot and define how to leverage Live Chat to support customers. Patient experience and revenue cycle own large parts of the customer experience, mapping dialogs to chat can be a good start, and then the appropriate customer service leaders can take it from there.

5. Craft FAQ’s based on questions from your call center and your chatbot. 

6. Define people and budget resources necessary to create a Customer Experience roadmap.

7. Commit to prioritizing and defining governance for those experiences.

8. Create an accurate provider directory that includes the clinics where those providers serve and the services and care those providers provide. 

9. Understand what matters most to customers. Cost, quality, convenience all factor into customer expectations. Define the order in which you’re prioritizing those expectations. In the early phases of their journey, the website is often the preferred interaction channel. Crafting projects that improve understanding care options, finding a doctor, and matching a customer’s insurance to services healthcare systems provide are likely candidates for customer experience project focus. 

10. Connect access with marketing and outreach efforts. As Paul Madsen, past CMO of Cleveland Clinic says, “Don’t show me a seat on a flight that I can’t book.” 

11. Gather the voice of the customer through other touch points (not just survey for care) and give more weight to the customer experience through

12. Establish a data center of excellence. Data analysis is done in silos, limiting our ability to see the bigger picture. Finger-pointing is also done in silos. We don’t have enough patients. Blame marketing. Our on-hold times are long. Blame the call center or clinics. 

13. Document how other departments operate and what their priorities are.

14. Define a resource for prioritizing healthcare data readiness, this is one of the industries biggest gaps. We have lots of data but aren’t incentivized to view it holistically. Who is responsible? How are decisions made? Who is at that table for decisions to be made from the data?

15. Leverage Health Risk Assessments as a tool for learning about patients and consumers health risk. How are we working together to manage each and every high-risk lead and nurture them from a marketing lead to a clinically qualified lead, to a new or loyal patient?

16. Define your Digital Front Doors and prioritize people and budget resources to meet patients at the doors they choose. Meet patients where they are. It’s natural to want to focus solely on the Epic/EMR Patient Portal Experience. Our “digital front door” includes but is not limited to My Chart. Google Business Profiles and other local listings management often matches the volume of patients and consumers engaging with My Chart. Visits to the website, primarily funneled from Google’s organic search engine results page, is close behind in the volume of visits by patients and consumers. 

17. Define people and budget resources and priorities for your website. Stop treating websites as if they’re free. They’re free like puppies are free.

18. Define a roadmap for self-scheduling. Google is working with many partners, including Epic, to craft the infrastructure to include self-scheduling from their Google Business Profiles.

19. Build a call center. In the absence of a call center and streamline how customers get routed to the right care.

20. Hire business people to help run the business. Whether your business focus is profitability or sustainability, hire people with the expertise and skills to navigate the business strategy necessary to meet those goals. Align those goals and anticipated outcomes with the Chief Experience Officer.

21. Organize your content resources around the people you serve and the services you provide, not the channels you manage.

22. Have a single source of truth for your products and services. Provider, location, and condition data is owned by many roles:

    1. Credentialing

    2. Operations

    3. IT

    4. Financial services

    5. Marketing

    6. Revenue cycle

    7. Clinical integration

23. Hire a taxonomy manager. If you're not sure what that is, ask Rachelle Montono.

24. Conduct discovery for a CRM. Discovery is a path to gathering technical and business requirements for a CRM. A Customer Relationship Management tool bridges the gaps between a customer, revenue, and our experience efforts. 

25. Invest in a CRM. When thinking through the org chart for a Chief Experience Officer, bring together roles that support primary experiences (patient care experience, digital experience, reporting and analysis). 

    
    

What projects is your system prioritizing to improve the customer experience? What are you doing to make those priorities transparent to the whole organization?