The backbone of a strong patient experience is data. Unless data is collected, understood, leveraged, and acted upon, it won’t impact patient satisfaction.
By leveraging data analytics and AI, healthcare organisations can identify patterns in-patient experiences, clinical care, and employee experience. Well-structured data also strengthens the process frameworks, workflows, and allows for a clear balance metrics.
There are 5 critical parameters that can help healthcare systems deliver improvements in patient experience, from leveraging performance-based metrics to leveraging next-gen technology.
1. Patient satisfaction should be balance metrics and not outcomes metrics
A balance metric allows healthcare organisations to evaluate if changes designed to improve one part of the system are causing new problems in other parts of the system? Using patient experience as a balance metric allows healthcare organisations to use evidence-based data in evaluating successful outcomes.
2. Don’t evaluate individual clinicians, evaluate overall care teams
It’s important patient experience surveys ask questions about their overall care experience and not of individual care interactions. This allows for the entire care team to understand their effectiveness and areas of weakness. It also allows for better collaboration and reduces any reluctance of individual care providers to drive patient satisfaction methodology due to fear of getting negative scores.
3. Use data analytics for effective decision making
The backbone of a strong patient experience is data. Unless data is collected, understood, leveraged, and acted upon, it won’t impact patient satisfaction. By leveraging data analytics and AI, healthcare organisations can identify patterns inpatient experiences, clinical care, and employee experience. Well-structured data also strengthens the process frameworks, workflows, and allows for a clear balance metrics.
4. Technology embracement
Technology innovations are revolutionizing the healthcare industry and patient experience in particular. Below are some of the ways this can be leveraged:
Wayfinding tools to reduce stress-free patient and visitor journeys
Real-time location services allowing better patient flow and low wait times
Interactive care information systems that provide patients more insights on their care
5. Improve employee engagement
Employee experience and engaged staff are the drives of outstanding patient experience. Healthcare organisations must invest in employee training and engagement to happy patients and happy staff. With technology evolving at a rapid pace and the pandemic putting severe strain on the healthcare workers, ensuring staff has access to the right training, systems and well-ness programs allows for amplified patient experience. Both go hand-in-hand.
Why data is critical?
Data-driven analytics nurtures deep connections between the business and its customers, allowing them to create more dynamic, responsive, and personalized services and customer journeys.
Let's examine how:
1. Personalization: Healthcare providers can craft entire patient journeys by gathering feedback at various touchpoints to deliver personalised and relevant services at appropriate times. The data set shared with internal teams can be used reliably and accurately to assess patient needs, better identify patient profiles and enhance programmatic advertising that will expose them to the products or services that will interest them most. That includes call-to-action, content offers, and e-mails.
2. Countless variables: An endless stream of data presents infinite opportunities to select the best way to refine outreach efforts. Data can uncover patterns and trends used to research interpretation, design surveys and studies, boost ROI, and reduce the cost of acquisition per patient.
3. Create frictionless experiences - Patients bargaining power is usually high after comparing the features and benefits of healthcare facilities with their needs. There is potential for the patient to switch to the competition when they want to spend less time waiting for service provision that poorly recognizes their previous visits information. If healthcare facilities can respond to a patient’s needs with agility, it improves the patients' experience and the more likely it is that they will return later on.
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