How AI is Making a Better Patient Experience
It can be easy to forget when you are in a hospital, but hospitals are businesses and if you need care, you are a customer. The unique nature of hospitals creates dynamics that camouflage that fact – most “customers” would rather not be there, sometimes the customer isn’t actually right, and surgeons don’t really compete on price – but the fact remains, if you did not like your visit to the hospital down the road, you can leave a negative Yelp review.
Hospitals and health care providers at large, are beginning to take notice of consumer choice. The internet has empowered patients to share their experiences, make recommendations, and guide future patients to institutions they found to be of good quality. Suddenly a problem that has harassed restaurant owners for years has found its way to the desks of hospital CEOs around the country.
Senem Guney is a thought leader in patient experience and the Chief Experience Officer at NarrativeDX. She says the internet has numerous platforms for patients to share their experiences, and they use all of them.
“We live in a very connected world, and today consumers have platforms to express their pleasure and displeasure like never before,” says Guney. “There are certainly places like Yelp or RateMDs.com, but there are also online forums and social networks where people share their stories. Bad reviews from patients can do significant damage to a hospital’s bottom line.”
That damage comes in the form of dwindling market share. A paper published in the American Economic Review found that hospital reputation was an important factor in their success. “We find robust evidence that higher performing hospitals–as defined either by the health outcome-based measures or the process of care measures–tend to have greater market share (i.e., more Medicare patients) at a point in time, and experience more growth in market share over time.”
Healthcare, for all the money that flows through it, is shockingly behind technologically. Today, patient experience is measured by a survey called the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (H.C.A.H.P.S.
