A few years ago, during a project with a notable health system, we sat in a dark viewing room, watching focus group participants pick apart our client. When the moderator checked in with us in the backroom minutes before finishing the group, we decided to send her back in with one simple question:
What is one thing that this health system has done well?
She posed the question to the group, and the response was pretty cold. People crossed their arms, frowned, and looked from one to the other uncomfortably.
Finally, someone spoke.
“Well…they cured me.”
This moment perfectly summed up something we observe time and again in our research for hospitals and health care systems: simply doing the work of curing a patient is not enough to win their admiration, let alone their loyalty. Because effective healthcare doesn’t necessarily equate to quality healthcare in the eyes of patients.
What is “quality healthcare” anyway?
For medical professionals, quality healthcare most often means providing care that increases the likelihood of desired health outcomes—especially care that is effective, efficient, safe and timely. With this perspective, quality is based on what can easily be measured, including infection rates, readmissions, mortality rates, and a host of other things.
While these professionals might believe their hospital provides the highest quality of care according to medical standards, their consumers have a much more expansive definition of quality. And it doesn’t just come from treatment plans.
Why do patients see things so differently?
For patients, quality of care begins the moment they interact with your organization: the moment they search for information and land on your website, request an appointment with a provider, or enter your practice.
How are they greeted by the parking attendant? Is the nurse taking their vitals friendly? Do they have to wait a long time to see a provider? Does the provider spend sufficient time with them? Does the provider seem interested in and concerned about the things that they care about?
All of these experiences are part of a patient’s definition of “quality of care” because each is an opportunity to demonstrate care and concern for that unique individual and to craft a positive and personalized experience.
And not only will bad interactions and experiences leave a bad taste in the patient’s mouth, they also make patients skeptical of your capabilities in other, unrelated areas of service. As a different focus group participant summed it up:
“If they can’t get [scheduling] right, what are they doing when I’m under anesthesia?”
What stays top-of-mind for patient like the one in our focus group is not their positive health outcomes; but rather the negative interactions they have throughout the care journey. Ultimately, the negative outweighs the positive.
Why should you care that patients measure quality differently?
Patients are increasingly self-driven in their healthcare choices: many go online first, and virtually all go online eventually, to research providers. They are looking for reviews, ratings and advice from others who have experience with their condition and your organization, and what they find can significantly impact the choices they make.
While some patients use these forums to discuss their recovery and health outcomes, most are focused on helping others like them seek out (or avoid) care at a specific hospital. There’s no doubt we hear our share of medical practice horror stories, but we come across even more stories about administrative challenges that leave a poor overall impression and damage a system’s brand reputation.
Brand reputation is one of the most important drivers of consumer choice for site of care for a serious condition, and reputation encompasses a consumers’ entire care experience. A strong brand reputation comes from establishing a deep connection. And poor interactions can damage your brand reputation instantaneously.
So what it comes down to is this: to be a high-quality and become the provider of choice, health care organizations must treat the entire patient experience as equally important as the treatment itself.
Your attention is best focused on tapping into those patient reviews, identifying, and addressing the pain points in the patient journey before more bad reviews earn you a bad quality rating that is hard to come back from. Award-winning doctors and groundbreaking treatment can only take you so far when patients expect the worst.
It also means developing a deeper understanding of what a patient journey looks like to recognize where each point of interaction becomes an opportunity for an improved experience. And working with a market research firm to map out what that patient journey looks like is a great first step!
Once you recognize what your touch points are, and any pain or discomfort associated with them– whether they’re related to access, administration or the care itself– you can allocate time and resources to improving those experiences.
This will boost your overall brand reputation in the eyes of the people that matter most to your bottom line.
At Market Street Research, we support clients through the process of measuring their brand reputation among their target patient population. If you’re interested in learning more about this kind of Market Intelligence study, contact us for a consultation today.