This week I’ve been blessed to be able to attend the Qualtrics X4 conference focused on experience management. This user conference brings together Chief Experience Officers from multiple industries with healthcare playing a major part. (Side Note: Colin is covering the event from a marketing and patient experience perspective on HITMC as well) The event is particularly interesting because their product literally forces us to listen to patients and employees. Just that simple mindset shift means you have different conversations.
A great example of this was shared by Jeff Logan, VP, Patient + Market Experience at Providence, who shared this really interesting framework for building trust (click here to view a larger version of the image):
Interesting model for trust at @providence
Many aspects of what we do is it just needs to work. It doesn’t have to be an overwhelmingly WOW experience. #qualtricsX4 @Qualtrics pic.twitter.com/HRunKtg63Z
— John Lynn (@techguy) March 9, 2023
It’s such an interesting concept to consider. Logan is right that sometimes we try to overthink what really needs to be done. Sure, it’s great if you can create a WOW experience for patients. However, there are plenty of things in healthcare that can’t be made into a WOW and patients don’t want them to be a WOW. They just want the thing to consistently and reliable work. They want it to solve the problem that they need resolved.
What’s powerful about this is that this is what you’ll learn when you actually start listening to patients. Patients aren’t usually asking for WOW when you ask them what they need. They mostly ask that things work. This was illustrated really well by Logan when he shared some things they learned from patients about their waiting room experience:
It’s not that it’s a 4 hour wait time (which is atrocious) but the complaints was my iphone died and there’s no charging places. It’s that someone was seen before me and they came in after.
It’s amazing what you learn when you listen to patients. @Qualtrics #qualtricsX4
— John Lynn (@techguy) March 9, 2023
To be fair, there are things they should do to address a 4 hour wait time. However, in an ED that can happen when a wave of patients all come in at once or other challenging situations. However, Logan highlighted that when they started listening to patients they were surprisingly understanding about the wait time. However, there were other simple things they could do to make sure the experience patients had during that wait was much better. I don’t think people would think of iPhone plugs or better communication as WOW. However, small changes like that can make the experience for patients significantly better.
There’s an incredible power in listening to patients. It’s amazing how many parts of the patient journey we don’t even have data about what patients think about it. That’s a problem that I heard from many at the Qualtrics event and one that we should work to solve. It’s hard to improve the patient journey if we don’t have any visibility into what patients really think about it.
In one of the mainstage keynotes by Accenture, they offered this simple approach to change:
Good process for business and life:
Listen
Learn a Little More
Change How You Act#QualtricsX4 @Qualtrics @accenture— John Lynn (@techguy) March 9, 2023
It’s funny to read such a simple three step approach. However, my time at the Qualtrics X4 event really taught me how impactful listening to patients and employees can be to an organization. Plus, I was particularly impressed by Qualtrics efforts to not just listen through things like surveys, but also implementing new efforts to passively listen to what patients and employees are experiencing based on their behaviors.
One of the most interesting sentiments shared a few times by healthcare organizations at the conference was that healthcare has spent a ton of effort on optimizing for quality and optimizing for revenue. Now is the time to optimize for experience. As healthcare organizations become more value based and have to compete with outside competitors like retail health, optimizing for experience is going to be even more important. Plus, it’s the right thing to do for patients and has amazing downstream benefits for your staff too.
