Enabling Healthy Decisions

The fact that most people would rate their experience with their health insurer low isn’t a big surprise to most of us in healthcare.  But, with the Triple Aim and other quality metrics, the customer experience is becoming an increasingly important metric.  Several recent surveys have talked about this as one of the top priorities for hospital systems.  And, as use of CAHPS continues to grow, this will be more closely linked with incentives.

“Patient experience is on the radar of hospital executives, especially since Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores will soon affect reimbursement,” said Jason Wolf, executive director of the Beryl Institute. “However, the data shows that executives are still grappling with how to implement change within their organizations.” (source)

Like in years past, health insurers just barely nudge out TV service providers to prevent being the bottom of the industry in Bruce Temkin’s Benchmarking work.  While I’d love to see healthcare broken out into hospitals, physicians, pharmacies, insurance companies, PBMs, and care management companies, I think we can assume some similar concerns would fall out.

Healthcare companies need to find ways to address this.  I think there are several key first steps:

1. Defining your customer;
2. Mapping their experience;
3. Creating personas or segments to think about (i.e., healthy, sick, insured);
4. Identifying influences on their experience (some of which you might not control);
5. Determining what matters versus doesn’t matter;
6. Capturing baseline metrics; and
7. Building a continuous improvement process.