In healthcare, a patient’s experience is impacted by many things. High-quality care is paramount, as is respect and empathy from healthcare providers. Accessibility is also important, enabling patients to see caregivers at convenient times and places. Minimizing paperwork, reducing wait times, providing comfortable waiting rooms, and encouraging friendly interactions with staff can all contribute to a positive experience.
What is patient experience?
The patient experience is defined as the sum of all the interactions that shape a patient’s perception of the care they receive from a healthcare provider. Healthcare interactions include the act of making an appointment, checking in at a doctor’s office, receiving treatment, engaging in follow-up communication after an appointment, paying medical bills, contacting insurance companies, and more.
What is patient experience vs. patient satisfaction?
Patient satisfaction is part of the patient experience. Patient satisfaction is subjective, measuring how patients feel about the care they receive in their interactions with doctors, nurses, and administrative personnel. Patient satisfaction is very much dependent on the expectations a patient has for their healthcare interactions. Patient experience is a broader concept and measures whether a patient’s care conforms to standards established by a healthcare provider or the healthcare industry. In other words, two patients could have the exact same patient experience in terms of care provided, but they may have very different levels of satisfaction depending on their expectations.
What’s the importance of patient experience?
Healthcare organizations strive to improve the patient experience for several reasons. The healthcare industry’s shift to value-based reimbursements closely links payment to the quality of the patient experience. Additionally, the rise of healthcare consumerism and competition have made it easier for patients to switch providers when they have a bad experience. That means that, for healthcare organizations, improving patient experience can have a direct impact on patient retention and financial viability.
What are the benefits of positive patient experiences?
Positive patient experiences offer a variety of additional benefits. Good experiences encourage patients to be more engaged in their care, increasing the likelihood they’ll take prescribed medications, adhere to a treatment plan, and take the steps necessary to prevent costly readmissions. Greater engagement often leads to better health outcomes. When healthcare organizations are strongly focused on improving patient experience, employees are more likely to follow best practices for procedures and recordkeeping that help prevent errors and enhance patient safety.
How do organizations improve the patient experience?
To improve the patient experience, organizations must identify all the interactions that patients have with healthcare providers, determine what happened during each interaction, and find out how patients felt about those interactions. This information provides a comprehensive view of the quality of the patient experience and enables healthcare organizations to identify gaps and areas for improvement that can be addressed through new initiatives, policies, and best practices.
How is patient experience measured?
To understand the details of healthcare experiences and how patients feel about them, organizations have traditionally used techniques like surveys, interviews, comment cards, and focus groups. While these methods offer some value, they are highly limited in scope and do not provide a comprehensive view of patient experience. Additionally, results are often biased, since patients responding to surveys or making comments are more likely to have very strong negative or positive feelings. To get a more complete picture, many healthcare organizations are now turning to conversation intelligence platforms that can capture experience data from a much broader range of patients.
How does conversation intelligence work?
Conversation intelligence uses AI-powered technology to capture and analyze interactions between patients and healthcare organizations. These interactions may include calls to a healthcare contact center, conversations with providers on medical portals, comments on social media and websites, and email, SMS text, and chat conversations with healthcare representatives. By transforming the unstructured information in these interactions into structured data that can be searched and analyzed, conversation intelligence solutions enable healthcare companies to glean insight about the patient experience from every conversation with patients, caregivers, and employees.
How does CallMiner help measure the patient experience?
The CallMiner Eureka conversation intelligence platform makes it possible to capture and analyze 100% of conversations with patients across all channels. CallMiner uses text and speech analytics to capture, transcribe, analyze, and categorize spoken and written conversations, determining both the meaning of a patient’s words and the emotion behind their behavior and sentiment. With this data, healthcare organizations can identify patterns, interpret nuance in conversations, and uncover opportunities to enhance the patient experience and drive improvement throughout the organization.
