Dive Brief:
- Geisinger Health System President and CEO Dr. David Feinberg, as the the keynote speaker last week at the annual Health Care Symposium at Misericordia University, announced a new app to guarantee patient satisfaction: the Geisinger ProvenExperience.
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Once patients have completed their treatment, they can go to the app, enter a code for the condition they had treated, provide feedback, and then decide whether to request a refund. The refund page knows what patients paid and allows partial refund requests on a sliding scale.
- The app has already been through a soft launch and was set for its formal launch this week.
Dive Insight:
It remains to be seen whether the concept of the money-back guarantee makes sense for healthcare -- and Feinberg himself said he isn't sure. However, he believes if healthcare doesn't do a better job of evolving the patient experience, the industry will be disrupted like the taxi and hotel industries.
“I don’t know if a money-back guarantee or warranty is the right way to do it, but I do know if we don’t figure out how to do it, somebody else is going to do it,” he was quoted by the Times Leader.
Feinberg said every other CEO he's spoken to has called the move a mistake, arguing all patients really care about is trust with their doctor, but he sees room for improvement in customer service, wait times, and more.
He added based on early feedback, most patients don’t actually want money back. “They tell us when you make a mistake what we want is for you to own it and apologize, and then we can talk about it.”