Patient Experience Issues in the Healthcare Industry

Introduction

There are still issues coming up through the healthcare industry today, especially to the healthcare workers and also the experience being offered to the patients from those healthcare workers. Patient experience has become an increasing topic of interest within the healthcare community lately. The way patients get to experience the services provided by healthcare workers is becoming more and more a topic of discussion due to the gradually increasing number of people pursuing healthcare services to better their health.

Issues have been being brought up regarding patient experience lately as a result of this increase of people needing medical attention. Let’s list down a few of those issues regarding patient experience and see where they are coming from.

Lack of Leadership

In any business or industry, patient or customer satisfaction is a top priority.

The healthcare industry does not have a person usually to assign focus solely on the patients in the care of a group of physicians. The staff in the workplace where patients are being cared for usually just spread the responsibility evenly between the people in charge of a certain patient. Recently, many healthcare workers have too many patients at a time to give efficient care, causing them to spread their attention thinly across all of their patients at a time.

Overall this causes the experience of the patients in a hospital to be less pleasing as compared to when they are in a restaurant for example.

According to a digital strategist expert named Ed Bennett, healthcare organizations must change their structure to deliver better, more seamless services to patients. His reasoning is that delivering patient centric-care is not yet in effect within the healthcare industry.

Lagging Behind Other Industries

Many other industries right now have come up with successful ways to fully optimize the customer experience. Concrete examples of these industries that have fully optimized customer experience are retailers and tech companies. These companies have streamlined the process in the services they provide to their customers such that in a simple click of a button, a customer can have what they want immediately. 

The healthcare industry, on the other hand, still has not made many leaps to improving patient experience within the hospital setting for example. Many people are complaining about the tedious process of getting any kind of healthcare service within a hospital or clinic, for example getting a proper medical history of a patient is still only written on paper.

The main issue here is that many practices of the healthcare industry are still completed mainly with a plethora of paperwork. This transition into a digital era will highly increase patient experience satisfaction. There is always an issue for the healthcare industry to go fully digital though, which is due to security and privacy reasons implemented by rules of the industry itself which prevents full digitization from happening.

Feedback is quite slow

Whenever people need to have something improved about a certain aspect that they feel needs some improvement, it is usually done by going into the feedback received by the industry in order to start improving certain aspects of service to their customers.

It is quite hard to quantify the feedback from patients just by word of mouth or measuring the relationship between healthcare workers and a patient. By going digital, the healthcare industry can have a new way to measure in numbers the feedback patients have for their stay during the hospital, similar to how buying products online can have a rating system. When put in place properly, the digitized system of feedback can greatly reflect on how well a certain hospital is treating their patients for example. This feature could increase patient satisfaction by giving a gauge to a patient, even before they are put in a hospital, of how good the quality of care is. 

Conclusion

Having the best experience while interacting with any business or industry is an urgent necessity that people try to have at all times possible. Many other industries such as the retailer and tech industries have all done their research and improved in many areas regarding their customer experiences. 

The same cannot be said yet for the healthcare industry though, since there is not a patient-centric person in charge at all times, it is behind in technology compared to other industries, and it has limited feedback to lay upon improvements.

What can be done to improve the patient experience overall?