In this article, we will review the state of the healthcare industry, the importance of excellence in patient care and how healthcare professionals can measure patient satisfaction to enhance their success.
Brief Review of Health-Care Current State
Healthcare is a service industry with a peculiar characteristic in the USA and in other countries: the demand for its professionals exceeds supply in many regions. The industry is also heavily regulated since it directly influences numerous human lives. Becoming a doctor requires not only having the necessary intellectual capacity but also submitting to exhaustive and expensive training.
Given these reasons, doctors are often perceived as one of the best compensated and most successful professionals – as they should be. That said, although demand exceeds supply and patients are often faced with limited choices, doctors still play in a competitive industry with some doctors achieving much higher success than others. There are a myriad of factors that drive professional success in healthcare – some are under the control of the doctors and some are not.
Doctors receive massive clinical training and limited business education. They are often skeptical about business concepts; after all, they believe that they will be successful regardless. While this vision may be essentially correct, it can also limit the degree of success of a doctor’s career. Doctors that ignore business tools are often still successful; however, the most successful professionals are the ones who correctly leverage relevant business instruments to their advantage.
Although the USA is clearly a leader in clinical care and research, its leadership in healthcare management is questioned. For instance, while doctors in most European countries, Australia and New Zealand adopt EMRs (Electronic Medical Records), it is estimated that only about a quarter of US doctors employ them. The adoption of EMRs in the USA has been controversial due to questions about its promised benefits, return on investment as well as privacy and legal issues.
We are also currently witnessing global competition in healthcare. For instance, medical tourism - when people visit another country to receive cheaper medical and dental treatment - and purchases of medicines from different countries - how many Americans buy drugs from Canada? - have been growing. Within the USA, we have seen insurance companies gain significantly power and influence in the last decades.
Therefore, the US healthcare industry is rapidly changing and that presents a unique opportunity for ambitious professionals ready to seize the opportunity.
Excellence in Patient Care as a Competitive Advantage
Successful companies offer their customers a unique value proposition. From Wal Mart “every day low prices” to Disney “creating magical moments for the guests”, businesses seek to differentiate themselves in competitive industries. As a health professional, you should ask yourself what the value proposition of your practice is. In other words, what can your patients expect when they see you? In healthcare, we are seeing practices using excellence in patient care as a differentiating factor. The point is that you are playing in a competitive service industry; so you should promise - and consistently deliver - a clear value proposition to your patients. This allows you to create a reputation that may become the foundation for success.
Almost everyone appreciates the importance of customer satisfaction. While yet to be scientifically proven, most business executives believe that the long term success of a company is highly correlated with customer satisfaction. While companies that neglect customer satisfaction can be successful in the short term, they are unlikely to enjoy sustainable and profitable long term growth.
Therefore, we are currently experiencing an explosion of customer satisfaction surveys. Visit a restaurant, a retail store or an auto shop and there are good chances you will receive an invitation to take a survey. Surveys are becoming a popular and powerful management tool to improve services and ultimately enhance success.
In health care, patient satisfaction is not the result of a successful treatment or the cure of a disease. Although these are important factors, patient satisfaction is ultimately dependent on multiple emotional and rational factors. It is determined by how the patient felt during the entire medical encounter - from the moment he arrived in the clinic, to the moment he left the parking lot. Therefore, receiving a greeting from the receptionist, being well treated by the nurse, and having all questions answered by the physician are all important. As a large part of the experience is out of the control of the doctor, patient satisfaction surveys not only demonstrate to the patient that the doctor genuinely cares about his opinion, but also provide physicians and medical managers with a unique opportunity to learn how to improve patient care. Patients that establish good relationships with their doctors are more likely to return and to recommend their doctor while unhappy patients can change providers, voice their frustrations to the public or even sue for perceived malpractice.
We are now living in a world where information is abundant and there is a clear trend to measure everything. Also, communications are nearly instant. In healthcare, this means that patients have easy access to various sources of information and can easily share their perceptions with others. These phenomenons are already impacting the industry. For example, today you can perform an internet search on a doctor and you will probably find ratings from other patients on her. If a doctor is not rated somewhere today, in a few months or years, she will. Most of the times, doctors are unaware they are being rated since patients post reviews on random websites in an unstructured manner. In the near future, patients will select a doctor similarly to how we shop for a car or a camera: we research on the internet, read reviews, eventually ask questions and then make a decision.
While some doctors see these trends as threats, some see them as opportunities to improve services and ultimately enhance success. Thus, we created a patient satisfaction survey solution to partner with doctors committed to excellence in patient care.
Why We Launched Our Patient Satisfaction Survey Company
Before creating our company, we did extensive research and spoke with many doctors. Virtually everybody agreed that, sometime in the future, most doctors will rely on surveys as a management tool for their practices. The problem today is, if you want to implement a patient survey tool in your medical or dental office, you face a process that is not only expensive but also time and energy consuming. For example: you need to select a few survey companies, call them, negotiate price, design the questionnaire, decide on how to deliver the survey, how many patients to survey, train your staff, develop the reports, analyze the reports – it is a hassle that busy professionals just cannot put themselves through. Similar reasons have partially contributed to the slow adoption of EMRs.
Therefore, there was no survey solution that could be implemented immediately with little effort, at an acceptable cost and that can provide doctors and medical managers with fast and powerful insights. Ergo, we carefully designed a process to address these hurdles. Unlike most survey companies that offer many services – often consulting and research – our sole focus is patient satisfaction surveys; we have no hidden agenda to cross-sell other services. Our ultimate goal is to provide our clients with valuable information that can help enhance their success.
About the company:
To learn more about our patient satisfaction solution, please visit http://www.reportfordoc.com/.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment