Dive Brief:

• When it comes to improving hospital patients’ satisfaction with their experience, a customer service consultant writes in Forbes that it makes sense to look beyond comparisons with other hospitals, and find new approaches from other industries. He says:
• Employees must see the creation of a good patient experience as underlying their daily functions, and try to make patients' first and last impressions good ones. A hospital's timetable on such matters as getting information to patients should be patient-centered, not based on the institution's convenience.
• Hospital workers must avoid poor use of language and "nonverbal snubs." And hospitals themselves must take a broad approach to hospital patient-satisfaction surveys.

Dive Insight:

Consultant Micah Solomon said "it’s time to benchmark healthcare customer service against the best across all service-intensive industries, because that’s what your patients and their loved ones will do." He asserts that every patient’s interaction with healthcare is partly judged by expectations set by the best organizations in retail, food service, the hospitality industry and financial services.

Solomon cautions hospitals that it could backfire if they focus too selectively on individual questions in HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) as a day-to-day approach. He argues that "a more effective and powerful goal is to create an organization-wide halo effect."

But that broader approach may be a tough sell to the industry. HCAHPS, as a national, standardized hospital survey, covers topics ranging from communication with doctors and nurses to how clean and quiet the hospital environment is. It is designed to publicly report comparable data to consumers and thus create incentives for hospitals to improve quality of care and make the healthcare system more transparent. As a practical matter, the need to perform well within those defined parameters likely will continue to set hospitals' approach to "customer satisfaction" apart from Starbucks' and the Ritz-Carlton's.