In Better Patient Engagement Through User Experience - Part 1 we discussed User Experience and Customer Experience in the context of patient engagement. In this post we will take a look at a few case studies of best practices in patient engagement and some considerations for User Experience.
Image Source: The Wall Street Journal (wsj.com)
“While we can’t please all people all the time, any goal short of 100% is unacceptable”
David Feinberg is a prime example of best in class patient engagement. He listens to people; he spends two hours a day doing his rounds where he hands out business cards for his patients to contact him. At the same time his leadership team are exploring what is going right and wrong and work in a dynamic environment to learn how to deal with it in the moment. As a result of this direct engagement, the number of patients at the Ronald Regan UCLA Medical Center willing to recommend the hospital to others skyrocketed, lifting their rating from the 57th percentile in July 2006 to the 95th percentile in March 2010. Another incredible case is the Cleveland Clinic, which has jumped from the 55th percentile to the 92nd percentile in overall patient satisfaction among roughly 4,600 hospitals.
Image Source: Cleveland Clinic (clevelandclinic.org)
“The focus on customer/patient should be the most important thing in healthcare—and it can be a real differentiator in hospitals. But for many hospitals, patient experience is about making and keeping patients happy, which misses the point completely because patient experience is also about the philosophy of the delivery of care.”
In terms of designing a user experience for patient engagement, the following points are guidelines to follow:
Make sure you know what success looks like. This entails a variety of areas.
- Establish clear goals
- Design metrics for success
- Bring stakeholders into the process
- Establish business case
- Best designed technology fades into the background
Understand your customer experience.
- Review customer satisfaction surveys
- Conduct user interviews and focus groups
- Consider in-situ ethnographic research
- Map customer journey's and hassles
- Incorporate customer's into the process
Always engineer for success.
- Make it convenient, personal
- Make it seamless across channels
- Test in-process designs with consumers-and redesign until you get it right
- Rethink policies
- Redesign workflows and roles to support new design
Implement, Monitor and Revamp
- Train the staff and ensure they know the scripts
- Measure engagement and customer satisfaction
- Check with users periodically
- Relentlessly review and continuously improve the experience
- Build processes to hear the voice of the customer routinely
These are practical ways in which to engage healthcare consumers effectively. None of this will occur overnight, and everything is a process. Cost and price is imperative because of high deductibles and major copays. This makes it easier for the customer to shop around to find the best deal available to them, so that they get high quality healthcare.
Engaging populations, such as the elderly, undeserved, and millennials are important. Ironically, text messaging works great for the under-served, and this is one way to not only use technology, but also to allow them to get to their appointments on time to maintain their health. Can you think of other creative ways we can reach populations as designers of future healthcare?
Customer experience strategy is a critical component of long-term sustainability. Healthcare organisations need to use analytics to track the efficacy of their customer experience strategy and see whether they meet their KPIs. How would patients rate a clinic or hospital? What changes need to happen in order to meet others needs effectively within a target market?
Customer engagement is critical factor to the success of an organisation, however facilitating engagement among staff and the patients through design requires much skill and iteration. Continuous focus on user experience and patient engagement requires a cultural change and a bottom up approach.
