Customer experience is not always customer experience. Sometimes, it’s client experience, patient experience, student experience or parent experience. Knowing your true customer is step one. Start peeling the layers away of the healthcare experience and you are quickly faced with complicated issues surrounding privacy, regulations and of course the daily nuances of the human condition. For a while now, I’ve been a student of the healthcare experience. Certain organizations, like the Cleveland Clinic, have been focusing on ways to improve the patient experience through simple steps like redesigning the ubiquitous hospital gown. It’s a wide open space. We’ve all been patients at some point so it’s no surprise to know that often the experience makes an uncomfortable or even painful episode that much worse. Continuing my studies, I discovered a few gems on how to approach the patient experience via several view points this week. Enjoy. Oh, and your gown is flapping back there.
Mary Pat Whaley outlines a simple strategy for welcoming complaints as a strategy for improvement. She also offers insight into how to handle them, including the dreaded apology.
Simple Solution: Better Signage
This is one of those “well, no duh” parts of experience that is often overlooked. The complex, labyrinthine healthcare complexes are not easy to figure out as a patient showing up for the outpatient procedure he or she is probably dreading anyway. Better signs? Well, bully for that idea! This *almost unbelievably* signage-focused blog, Conversations About Signage, actually gets it right – improving signs so patients can find their way actually would improve the experience. My favorite mention is that of the way hospital staff will always have to help people find their way, so why not make it easier on them, as well?
Honest Attention from Nurses Help Patients Heal FASTER
You read that right. The more “present” nurses are within the experience with patients, the faster those patients heal. Awesome payoff for a small investment in the true experience, IMHO.
We’ve all been patients. What would you suggest to improve the patient experience?
Photo credit Into the Wild via Creative Commons
