The Difference Between Patient Satisfaction and Patient Experience

Think about the answer to this question: how many nights have you spent in a hotel in the last decade? For most of us, the answer is more than 100. How many nights have you spent in a hospital in the last decade? For most of us, the answer is probably between zero and 10. So then, when you go somewhere to spend the night and have your meals delivered, from which organization do your expectations about being satisfied most likely come?

Patient, customer. Hospital, hotel. Tomato, ta-mah-tow. For those who want to argue that there are no similarities, feel free to continue to do so. For the rest of us, let us look at how to improve patient satisfaction.

A few days ago, I spoke with a hospital CEO about his efforts to improve the patient experience. He said that for years his hospital has spent a lot of money buying all sorts of data about their patients’ experiences. The problem, he said, is that the company providing the data never did anything more than sell them the data. So they kept getting all this data, but never saw any improvement in their patients’ experience that could be tied to the data they purchased.

That hospital has also hired coaches in the belief that this would help improve the experience. The results were the same.

I asked him why he kept spending money when the expenditures failed to deliver the desired result. He replied that the two things he knew he could do that would yield the greatest and most immediate increase in patient satisfaction would be to increase the number of parking spaces and to improve the food service. Did he learn that from the survey data or from the coaching? Nope. He learned that from his patients’ family and friends.

Four rules worth remembering:

1. Experience and satisfaction are related, but they are not the same.
2. Every patient has an experience, but the experience does not always result in a satisfied patient.
3. Patient satisfaction cannot be improved without knowing a patient’s expectations.
4. Purchasing data and paying for coaching do not change the first three rules.

Having thousands of data points comparing how your hospital is performing against other hospitals gives you a report card; it does not improve either the patient’s or patients’ experience. Coaching employees probably will not improve patient experience.

It is not the employees that need fixing. Broken, outdated processes result in dissatisfied patients.

Patients have multiple points of contact with the hospital: before they are admitted, while they are in the hospital, and when they go home. If you can answer the following questions, you have a basis for improving patient satisfaction.

• Which points of contact have the greatest impact on patient satisfaction?
• When did anyone last ask patients to define their expectations?
• Which points of contact affect most of your patients?
• Which points of contact are frequented most by your patients?
• What are the consequences of not knowing these answers?

The answers to these questions do not require purchasing data, nor do they require coaching.

Two highly frequented points of contact are your website and your call center. Go to your website and try to complete a simple task schedule an appointment, or try to understand your bill — tasks that might be done by a patient or by a patient’s family member. Could you do it? Were you satisfied?

Now dial the call center and ask the person who answers the phone a question about Medicaid or Medicare billing. Could that person give you the correct answer? Could the person they transferred you to give you the correct answer? Did the recorded voice telling you to call back between the hours of eight and five give you the correct answer? Were you satisfied?

If you were not satisfied, why would you expect your patients to be satisfied? Satisfaction has everything to do about processes and customer service. Data and smiles do nothing to improve broken processes and poor customer service.

[This piece was originally published on Paul Roemer’s blog, Health IT Strategy. To follow him on Twitter, click here.]