“What’s that you want to talk about?” said a firm but clear heavy voice of Chief Operating Officer at leading global Healthcare hospital chain.
“I need few minute of yours,” says my friend, “ to talk about on – How are we helping hospitals and healthcare centers to increase their patient volume and market share?”
“If you are trying to talk about Patient Relationship Management and its uses – I think, it’s Resting In Peace. We clearly don’t need any other Database management system to manage and maintain records for our patients”, he quickly moved his fingers across password combination to unlock his iPad to check on notification beeps which he heard while the conversation was on. He sounded critical.
“Patient Relationship Management is dead. Did he say that?” was running into my friends mind.
My friend tried to listen to the silence of the moment. After a brief pause when he had undivided attention of the title-holder, he said, “I don’t think I am trying to sell you a software or a service here but to talk about our observations which we have found while working with other global health providers.”
He continued, “All organizations work towards their key priorities, and they differ across. But, something which we found out was that as an organization strategy – development of Patient Experience existed as one of Top-5 priorities of Healthcare provider.”
“I agree. Which healthcare center would not want an optimal for its Patient? For us, it’s Patient First. Right from the start we have been pretty religious in adhering to this philosophy. While ensuring Positive patient experience is everybody’s job, we have very clear focus and strategy around managing and maintaining patient experiences. We started with developing uniform service standards and building a culture of empathy and care. I think that was a real good way to lay the groundwork for an institution.”, if a passion had an opportunity to speak, the sound would have been no different. It was surely an insightful discussion in progress.
“As we started growing in numbers , Technology was a life saver. We were sure that we need to leverage technology to streamline processes and to create easy and efficient experiences. We did a good job with technology adoption and implementation. Yes, we were soon to realize that missing common definition for patient experience would not help us to sustain with our initiatives; so, we quantified our approach around Patient experience management. We were clear that our initiatives need to go beyond a lone departmental initiative to truly be effective and help improve our overall market share, positioning and volume.” said a contemplative tone of a leader.
My friend was quick to add to the points to the ongoing discussion, “I am glad that you’ll have been working hard in enabling and sustaining Patient Experience initiatives. I think, a well thought and executed Patient Experience initiatives have three definitive advantage:
- Experience Management may result in additional revenue through an increase in referrals from patients, caregivers and referring physicians
- Providing an exceptional experience can turn satisfied patients into advocates, providing recommendations to friends and family
- Word of mouth marketing.”
He continued, “Managing experience with technology helps you drive and sustain initiatives by adopting efficient ways. Majority of organizations currently utilize technology as means to manage the patient experience. Integrated systems with other healthcare providers and service recovery systems are being used by most organizations today. These systems improve the efficiency of many activities throughout the patient experience, from making an appointment to following up with their primary care physician.”
“We help healthcare providers use technology to measure patient satisfaction in real time via a dashboard which can facilitate and expedite service recovery and continuous service improvements. Using technology to track patient preferences or customize service to track and address their unique needs when visiting your institution can make for a better experience. Yes, Technology is only an aid and not a substitute for human touch, which will have strong positive impact on the overall experience – we help healthcare centers and institution to move from Conveyor-Belt Care to Wrap-Around Care.” were my friend’s earnest words. The discussions were slowly getting more objective.
“Patient experience is a strategic imperative; closing the gap would require shared vision, a clearly defined patient experience strategy, strong leadership to execute, and a patient-focused culture to implement. For a successful endeavor in patient experience management, leadership needs to be behind the patient experience management strategy on an institutional level and develop teams, meetings and constant communications and workshops to build and maintain faculty and staff support and engagement in these efforts.” was a consulting voice of my friend. His implementation experiences with Salesforce based solutions for hospital and healthcare was coming in handy.
He continued, “Our packaged solution built on Salesforce, HealthOne, is an integrated solution approach which helps you with:
- Integrates with existing back office & scheduling system
- Real time information sharing
- Custom application to manage doctor recruiting & scheduling
- Application make sure emergency rooms are staffed during natural calamity or disaster
- Chatter to integrate with intranet and help employees collaborate and be up-to-date
- Content management program to share job-postings, marketing materials, and information with employees and corporate clients
- Marketing cloud to listen and participate in conversation with clients through social channels”
“Our team has utilized technology to its core and help healthcare centers to provide Personalized and effective levels of care without raising costs. Our automation app eliminates cumbersome paper processes & freeing everyone to focus on patient care. Employee social network connects the staff and hospitals across globe, and you get an interactive portal for each of your patients – enabling self-service care- to manage and monitor appointments, real time interaction with physicians, check their reports and other tools to help you become a true digital health care center.” were my friends pitch to the reverent title-holder. Though his persuasion skills were top-notch, here, he wanted to establish that they are good at customizing their offerings and help create a positive patient experience culture.
“HealthOne though is a packaged software offering built on Salesforce; our team creates a custom approach and customizes the solution further to meet your needs. A complex yet integrated economies where achieving sustainable organizational growth depends on adoption and adaptation of technological innovation at the right time, in the right manner, and with right resources. We do it all for you by being you.” was clearly a Sales Pitch by my friend.
Concluding the discussion; my friend stood up, shook hands and said, “We walk the Road in your Shoes, We see the world through your eyes. Thank You for your time and patience”.
Before heading out, with a broad smile on my friend’s face – he said, “One last thing – Every Patient has a story.”
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