How To Deliver Exceptional Patient Experience During Every Interaction

Where Do You Fall Short Delivering Patient Experience?

Many healthcare organisations provide excellent care. But they drop the ball when it comes to patient experience.

This situation is unfortunate because patients judge you by what they understand. And they know a lot more about service than healthcare treatments.

This means if the receptionists don’t acknowledge a patient when they walk through your door, you immediately face an uphill battle to win back trust.

The good news is that patient journey mapping can help to mitigate this problem.

What Is Patient Journey Mapping?

Patient journey mapping is a process that can help you to:

Find out why patients cancel appointments and how you can decrease no-shows by as much as 30%.
Reduce your patient acquisition costs by as much as 501% while growing your practice,
Get staff ‘buy-in’ to your patient experience vision by defining goals and responsibilities.
And much more.

It is a proven way to deliver exceptional patient experiences at every touch point. And it has been tested in dozens of healthcare markets from one-man GPs to private hospitals.

How Patient Journey Mapping Works…

First, map all the phases necessary in the patient journey.

For each stage, I look for gaps between your patient needs and what you deliver. This process tells you what you need to work on as a healthcare practice.

Second, identify phases where patients feel frustrated or under-appreciated.

For instance, if your patient is seeking education and you fail to provide it, that is a mismatch. There could be dozens of similar mismatches in your patients' journey.

Finally, uncover opportunities to improve your patient experience.

These hidden opportunities can grow your reputation and future revenues by allowing you to make educated moves instead of guessing.

It Sounds Simple…

But Patient Journey Mapping gives insights that build patient and staff loyalty, make employees happier, achieve revenue gains of 5 to 10 percent, and increase client retention by 5 to 15 percent within two or three years.

It can also help you:

See what patients want and need from you
Visualise patient expectations
Get clear on how patients interact with your healthcare business

And much more… These benefits add up to some breathtaking results.

WOW them at the Start!

A great first impression sets the patient up with better expectations and greater likelihood for actually making it to the end of the experience.

Extend the patient journey…

Meeting patients earlier in the journey or taking them to the next step can change your metrics and business results in big ways.

Erasing Troughs

A particularly bad point in the experience can be inverted to become a memorable moment for patients. With a great solution, you might even invert the trough into a new memorable peak in the experience.

Create a smoother process by identifying problems, solve them early and create a smoother process.

A reoccurring problem in the patients’ experience can often be solved by looking upstream in the experience to find where the problem could be avoided or diminished.

Work the way the patient does.

Your patient’s natural decision-making process happens in a logical order, but perhaps the order of your business processes are not aligned.

Magnify peaks to take advantage of your strengths.

You might have a strong point in the experience that you do better than your competitors, but not every patient experiences it or it simply doesn’t stand out. Embellish your strengths so that patient feels its full-force.

Smoother Handovers

Patients quit the journey or have big frustrations when they seemingly have to start over again or get handed over during different stages of their healthcare process.

Skips and Jumps

Completely remove steps or stages of the journey that you can do on your patient’s behalf.

Total Reimaging

Create a competitive advantage by creating a completely new experience, taking advantage of capabilities that competitors haven’t or just can’t take advantage of.

A Strong Finish!

The end of the experience leaves a lasting impression – it’s one of the things patients remember most about their experience. Finishing on a high helps send patients off with a very positive recollection of their journey.