Patient satisfaction is increasingly gaining significance and becoming a key differentiator—giving the current healthcare landscape a competitive edge. However, healthcare organizations most often may not primarily focus on tracking and monitoring patient satisfaction scores, a crucial aspect in enhancing Patient Experience (PX).

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Hospital Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) have designed standardized survey instruments and data collection methodologies that help Hospitals and Medical Practices gather actionable insights on Patient Satisfaction Index (PSI) to further transform Patient Experiences. However, Hospitals and Practices that realize the power of and want to take the patient satisfaction approach to gain the competitive advantage and accelerate business performance—need to have a more nuanced strategy to analyze and evaluate Patient Satisfaction Scores and understand patient expectations.

Combined with the right data and analytics, Hospitals and Practices can harness these insights to identify the specific areas of patient experience that need to be prioritized, in order to achieve sustainable results. This blog outlines proven strategies and industry best practices to enhance PX and as a result drive patient satisfaction and outcomes.

In the world of growing consumerism, Patients as consumers are attuned to hyperpersonalized and high-touch Customer Experiences (CX) in retail, banking and other sectors, and they expect the same from healthcare. This trend is further fueled by key drivers including the paradigm shift from Fee-for-service to value-based care and reimbursement models that make PX even more imperative for healthcare.

Key Contributing Factors to Patient Experience

Doctor and Nurse Empathy	Keeping Patients in the Loop of what’s happening throughout the patient journey	The patient outcome of the care journey	Cleanliness of the facility
A warm and friendly ambience of the room and a pleasant stay	A quiet and calm environment	Administrative efforts that simplify healthcare experiences	Having a single point of contact for patient concerns
The amenities	When the cost of care is justifiedvalue for money	Transparent pricing structure	Comfortable waiting rooms that can tackle the wait time frustration
Timely appointments	Effective pain management techniques	High quality of food	Connected environment to seamlessly interact with other caregivers
Simplified access to critical patient information	Simplified and automated patient self-scheduling features	Ease of parking	Access to a host of TV channels

Patient Experience Strategies to Transform Business Outcomes

To elevate business outcomes, healthcare organizations need to define the goals and objectives of the desired outcomes at a granular level. For instance, some of the key goals could be to improve hospital outcomes, increase retention rates, among many others. Once you have defined the key goals, they need to be mapped to the relevant questions that help evaluate the patient experience index.

Once you architect the survey structure and the respective questions, the next focus area should ideally be about establishing the core metrics involved in engaging patients and making them actively participate in the survey—to drive more accurate and holistic results. Eventually, these predictive analytical insights combined with automation and Artificial Intelligence technologies like machine learning and deep learning enable healthcare systems create robust patient experience strategies that foster continuous improvements that help them gain the competitive edge through superior PX. To ensure that they stay on top of the patient experience strategies, Hospitals and Practices need to update these research techniques to stay relevant and align with the evolving patient expectations.

To learn more about how your healthcare organization can harness the power of automation and analytics to build robust patient engagement strategies, Give us a shout!