Empathy and Efficiency: Transforming the Patient Experience in Healthcare

How can healthcare providers improve PX?

Be empathetic. Improving PX starts with understanding what patients are going through when they interact with your healthcare system. In the healthcare environment, empathy involves understanding patients' feelings, concerns and circumstances-and acting upon that comprehension in a way that conveys your empathy. Treating patients with empathy boosts diagnostic accuracy, patient satisfaction and adherence to medical advice. It also reduces medical complications and psychological distress.

When we talk about empathy in a healthcare setting, we usually think about how healthcare professionals treat their patients. While provider empathy is essential, there's another important way to use empathy to improve PX: Consider patient needs when designing interactions. Doing so will improve the overall patient journey.

A patient journey refers to the series of interactions a patient has with your healthcare organization to accomplish a particular task (e.g., schedule an appointment, pay a bill, manage their health condition after the visit, etc.). For example, to schedule an appointment online, a patient logs in to the online portal, provides or updates insurance information, completes the health screening questionnaire, selects the desired provider and clinic location, views the available appointments, selects a day/time and then receives a confirmation. If anything goes wrong in this process (e.g., the patient can't log in to the portal, or the available appointments don't show up), scheduling the appointment becomes a frustrating experience.

When you understand patients' needs, emotions and pain points (figurative as well as literal), you can design communications and implement digital tools that make patients' healthcare journeys less painful. For example, you can use a journey management system to send follow-up instructions-including a list of prescription discount programs-via the patient's preferred communication channel.

You can even train your conversational artificial intelligence-powered chatbot to convey empathy. In one study comparing physician and chatbot responses to 195 patient questions on Reddit's "AskDocs" forum, chatbot responses were preferred over physician responses and rated significantly higher for both quality and empathy.

Use customer journey management. According to a survey of 122 patient experience leaders in healthcare, PX leaders have seen patient expectations increase in the past few years. More than half of respondents said patients 1) have an increased demand for quicker response times (57%), and 2) expect seamless integration of departments for quick support/problem resolution (56%).

Most PX leaders (74%) find it difficult to identify where to start to improve patient journeys. Patient engagement solutions help healthcare organizations meet patient expectations/demands, but these tools are underutilized in healthcare. More than half (55%) of respondents are not using any patient engagement solution (PES), and 56% of the organizations that are using a PES are not using a journey orchestration platform.

Patient journey management refers to using real-time patient data to analyze current behavior, predict future behavior and send the right messages at the right time via the patient's preferred communication channel. Journey management is the key to delivering smarter, personalized notifications related to these critical patient journeys:

• Scheduling/managing appointments
• Receiving test results
• Managing prescriptions (e.g., receiving prescription refill reminders)
• Paying bills
• Managing a chronic disease (e.g., receiving instructions and reminders to take medication or measure blood pressure)