Patient Satisfaction Scores - how well are you managing expectations?
The secret to having happy [customers, employees, patients, referral sources, partners...] is not fulfilling their every wish and desire, but keeping their expectations reasonable. Training your staff to focus on properly setting and managing expectations may be the key to your success. In the age when patient satisfaction surveys have such high visibility, why not focus on under promising rather than over delivering to achieve a high score.
Let’s look at how managing expectations can help us in the relationship with our patients:
SERVICE SCOPE: Many of your patients are receiving patient care at home for the first time. In the big picture, they don’t know what to expect. Certainly they are happy to be out of the hospital where nurses wake them up in the middle of the night to take vital signs, but this quickly turns to questions about who will make sure everything is going to be ok. Patients and care givers need to understand what home infusion therapy is in the context of the other health care services they require to deal with their disease.
PROCESS: Patients have expectations about more than what we are doing. They also want to know the process by which it will be done. Say you were at your doctor’s office and the doctor pulled out a needle and stuck it in your arm without warning. The content of the medical care would be sound, but I bet you wouldn’t be happy about how it was delivered. In the same way, patients new to home infusion therapy need to understand the overall process and get comfortable with what you are doing for them. It helps them begin with the end in mind and be comfortable through the process. Make sure your patients and physicians understand the details of how and when you will deliver services so their expectation is in line with what you plan to do.
ROLES AND RELATIONSHIPS: You must also manage patient’s expectations on the roles you and they will play in the delivery of their therapy. Remember, home infusion is often a replacement for hospital based care and you are not set up to have the same services of a hospital. At the outset you must communicate to the patient the roles they will pick up and those you will be responsible for. Who will call the doctor if there is an issue? Should they call or will you call? When should they call you? Who will provide them with medical information – you or their physician? During the teaching process, make sure the patient and care giver understands their role and responsibility and knows what they can depend on you to do. Then, exceed their expectations.
The reason you must manage all of the non-clinical dimensions of your service is that clients are often not very good at discerning the quality of the products we deliver. They are not clinical experts, so they gauge their satisfaction based on other characteristics of their interactions with you and your staff. You can deliver a great service and meet all of the clinical and pharmaceutical needs of the patient exactly according to your clinical protocol and still have an unhappy patient. Furthermore, with the above in mind, you can deliver a sufficient service that does not meet your clinical protocol but addresses the non-clinical issues mentioned above and have a very satisfied patient.
In summary, it’s not what we deliver that really matters, but the difference between what we deliver and our patient/customer expected to receive that is the source of their satisfaction. So, if you want better patient satisfaction scores, think more broadly than the clinical issues and include the non-clinical issues above. Just like profit is a function of revenue and cost, satisfaction is a function of results AND expectations.