The patient experience is the sum of all the interactions that shape a patient’s perception of the care they receive from a healthcare provider. These interactions include everything from contacting a doctor’s office for an appointment to the experience of checking in and interacting with staff, receiving treatment and follow-up care, making payments, and contacting insurance providers. The patient experience is impacted by many people, including doctors, nurses, administrative personnel, customer care representatives, insurance representatives, and others.
What is patient experience vs. patient satisfaction?
Patient satisfaction is a subjective measurement of how patients feel about the care they receive. Patient experience measures a broader spectrum of interactions and concerns whether patients’ care meets the standards set by the healthcare industry or a specific provider. Two patients could receive the same patient experience but have very different levels of patient satisfaction.
Why is patient experience important?
Increased healthcare consumerism and competition have made it far easier for patients to seek alternate care when they have a negative experience with a healthcare provider. Additionally, reimbursement in value-based healthcare programs is linked to the quality of the patient experience. By striving to understand and improve the patient experience, healthcare organizations can both improve patient retention and protect the bottom line.
What are the benefits of a positive patient experience?
- Better health outcomes. Patients with a positive experience are more likely to remain engaged in their care, follow treatment plans, and take prescribed medications.
- Reduced costs. Better health outcomes and improved patient satisfaction result in higher patient engagement which can prevent costly readmissions.
- Stronger patient satisfaction. Patient experiences that focus on clear communication and building trust help patients to feel valued and understood, improving patient satisfaction.
- Enhanced safety. A strong focus on the patient experience encourages healthcare providers to follow best practices for procedures, record-keeping, and other activities that help prevent errors and increase patient safety.
What makes a good patient experience?
Many factors impact the patient experience. Care provided to patients must meet the highest standards. Accessible care is essential, whether it’s offering after-hours appointments or making it easier to see a specialist. Respect, empathy, and clear communication from providers keep patients engaged in their healthcare journey. Providing information on prevention and treatment helps patients make better decisions. Minimizing wait times, streamlining bureaucracy and paperwork, offering online scheduling, sending appointment reminders, comfortable waiting rooms, and frequent follow-ups can all contribute to a more positive patient experience.
How can providers improve the patient experience?
The most important steps in improving patient experience is understanding it. By collecting data about their experiences from patients themselves, healthcare providers can measure patient experience, identify areas for improvement, and take concrete steps to implement changes to enhance experiences.
How do you measure patient experience?
Healthcare organizations have traditionally measured patient experience through direct feedback from surveys, comment cards, interviews, focus groups, and patient stories. However, these methods are inherently limited by small sample sizes and by the fact that respondents are more likely to have strong positive or negative opinions. For this reason, many organizations are adopting conversation intelligence technology that can automatically capture and analyze all interactions with customers across every channel.
How does conversation intelligence work?
Conversation intelligence uses machine learning and AI-powered technology to extract meaningful insights from the unstructured information in spoken and written conversations. By capturing, transcribing, analyzing, and categorizing every interaction with patients, a conversation intelligence platform delivers far deeper insights into the patient experience than other technologies. Conversation intelligence can understand a patient’s words and the emotion behind them, revealing the drivers of patient satisfaction, behavior, and choices.
How does CallMiner Eureka help improve patient experience?
CallMiner offers the world’s most comprehensive platform for analyzing omnichannel interactions at scale. CallMiner Eureka makes it possible to analyze 100% of patient conversations on every channel – email, chat, SMS text, social media, websites, and calls to a healthcare contact center. By transforming the unstructured information in these interactions into structured data that can be searched and analyzed, CallMiner delivers a deeper understanding of the patient experience based on the unsolicited information provided by patients themselves. With insight provided by CallMiner, healthcare organizations can take steps to improve patient satisfaction, reduce compliance risk, accelerate revenue cycle management, and enhance operational efficiency with a better understanding of the drivers of patient concerns, wait times, billing issues, and more.
