Healthcare CX: How to Increase Patient Satisfaction

Patients expect to be happy with their treatment in a healthcare facility. However, healthcare professionals struggle to create satisfactory experiences for patients.

Thomas H. Lee, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, says “The patient experience is the ultimate benchmark of quality in healthcare.” Still, 67% of patients report a negative healthcare experience, according to a study conducted by Accenture in 2021.

This article aims to be a reliable reference when making changes to offer a distinctive healthcare experience. Before diving deeper into how to improve patients’ healthcare customer experience (CX), let’s look at the fundamentals.

What Is Healthcare CX?

Healthcare CX covers the entire patient journey, from scheduling an appointment through diagnosis and treatment to post-care follow-up. It includes everything a medical institution does to give its patients a satisfying experience.

Press Ganey, an Indiana-based healthcare company known for distributing patient satisfaction surveys, reports, “Patients value customer service and communication more than attitude and the conduct of a physician in their presence.”

Simply put, patient experience is about more than how a doctor treats a patient. Meaningful CX helps you stand out among other healthcare providers.

Aside from this, ensuring positive CX in the healthcare industry also helps to do the following:

• Improve the number of repeat patients: Providing patients with precisely what they need gives them a reason to come back when they need further healthcare.
• Make the customer journey less time-consuming and more efficient: Adopting CX strategies that automate lengthy processes in a medical institution makes this possible. For example, you can automate appointment scheduling through interactive voice response (IVR).
• Build trust and loyalty: Delivering an experience that tops your customers’ satisfaction encourages them to return. With time, this builds a brand value that helps you obtain more patients through referrals.
• Cut costs: Using the many digital tools for CX allows you to automate tasks and activities that previously required human staff. These tools free your staff from routine activities, giving them more time to deal with critical issues. It cuts costs while making the human workforce more productive.

What Are the Most Significant CX Issues in Healthcare Today?

Healthcare has issues related to its affordability and cost-effectiveness. When it comes to CX, healthcare lags behind other sectors, like banking and retail. Although healthcare made some digital transformations after COVID-19, it was underprepared for simultaneously supporting a massive patient pool.

The digital transformation was tricky since providers must adhere to strict regulations in this sector, and new technology might risk security and privacy policies. Due to this issue, healthcare institutions still deal with the following concerns.

Long wait times

Patients often face problems getting an appointment, either online or in offline waiting rooms. This causes frustration, resulting in many complaints about appointment scheduling. Clinics don’t have a huge workforce that can support different communication channels. A receptionist often supports various channels at a time, but they can only do so much.

Such setups can benefit from adopting a CX platform to aggregate all communications channels in one place, allowing patients to schedule appointments through phone, chat, or any other available channel. This approach makes it easier for a one-person healthcare facility to deliver a satisfactory patient experience.

Complex navigation

Patients struggle with navigating their healthcare journey, especially when it’s their first time using that facility. Making a booking, reserving slots for tests, or claiming insurance becomes a hassle, discouraging them from pursuing the treatment.

Modern healthcare facilities often create a unified journey for patients using their electronic health records (EHR) and claims histories. CX platforms integrated with a CRM can assist in such situations, making it easier for patients to receive treatments faster and without extensive Q&A and form-filling.

Inconsistent communication

Patients expect to be updated effectively about their health diagnosis and the treatment they’re receiving or are yet to receive. This helps them prepare beforehand and avoid any last-minute rush.

For example, if their lab test is scheduled for the afternoon, keep them updated about the time slot well in advance so they can take care of any other prior engagements.

Regulatory and privacy concerns

Healthcare organizations must strictly adhere to regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to maintain patients’ privacy. Digital transformation requires a facility to set up robust security and privacy measures, often requiring significant upfront investments.

However, software-as-a-service businesses have made it easier to prove compliance. It’s advisable to work with vendors who care deeply about these regulations and build systems and processes that can help you achieve better efficiency.

5 Ways Healthcare Companies Can Improve CX

When customers pay, they desire more in return. In healthcare, patients desire satisfaction more than care. They seek holistic care while also expecting a seamless experience.

Healthcare facilities often limit themselves to simply providing treatment, but here are a few ways to deliver the experience customers seek.

1. Streamline appointment scheduling and follow-ups

A telehealth service helps you to automate appointments. It also allows patients to access essential healthcare services remotely, such as scheduling appointments or virtual consultations with healthcare providers.

When a patient requests an appointment, they get automated reminders and notifications about their upcoming visit or online consultation. A phone system integrated with your CRM will automatically remind you in a week to check if another appointment needs to be arranged.

2. Improve omnichannel communication

Omnichannel communication delivers a streamlined and consistent CX throughout various touchpoints in the patient journey. It integrates phone, email, chat, and text messaging into a unified platform that helps you offer personalized CX. Ensuring the same context across interactions becomes easier while allowing healthcare providers to have more frequent patient interactions.

Eric Topol, a famous cardiologist, scientist, and author, says removing the human component from medicine is challenging. However, the present circumstances also force us to think digitally, and the goal is seamless interaction between humans, digital processes, and technologies.

A unified communication platform helps achieve this goal while ensuring medical teams and admin staff have real-time access to patient communication.

3. Provide personalized service with contextual insights

People expect healthcare facilities to be more anticipatory than reactive to patients’ needs. Access to extensive patient data helps deliver a good experience in this area. A unified communication system integrated with CRM records all interactions, helping you drive the insights that allow you to communicate and act as per patients’ expectations.

Many facilities personalize interactions with AI-powered chatbots, which analyze patients’ data through machine learning capabilities. This helps agents understand a patient’s medical journey and health data, allowing them to communicate with them more contextually.

4. Self-service portals and chatbots

Self-service portals let patients access their medical records and contact their healthcare providers while sharing educational materials, such as videos and articles. These tools allow patients to help themselves, reducing the number of calls your admin team receives. They also provide patients with helpful material that can immediately solve their reason for calling, encouraging them to take a more active role in managing their health.

However, portals can sometimes be tricky for patients who are new to them. In such instances, AI chatbots support portals to make them more accessible to patients. Beyond this, chatbots streamline administrative tasks while providing 24/7 support to patients.

5. Implement proactive outreach and follow-up programs

Proactive outreach encourages patients to take action regarding their health and keeps them engaged in their care. It positively impacts CX and often involves reaching out to patients due for an appointment or follow-up care. IVR systems that contact patients after their appointment or treatment ensure they feel heard and cared for, making it a critical element of patient engagement after consultation.

Automating the patient communication follow-up process using SMS or other reminders enables you to reach out to more patients. Not only do you save time and money, but you also keep patients engaged in their care journey while keeping them informed and satisfied.

What Tools Can Support Your Healthcare CX?

According to American cardiologist Eric Topol, ”The future of healthcare is digital, but the heart of healthcare is still human”. This is further supported by the fact that, over the last few years, patients have wanted to check billing, pay online, and know what care they got.

Unlike in the 1970s, when the cure experience was all about the doctor and the patient, today’s experience is more personalized through digital systems and processes. Here are a few tools that support CX in healthcare.

Contact center platforms with integrated CRM

Contact center systems paired with CRMs and electronic medical records enable agents to access patient information instantly, reducing response times and promoting service quality.

Such systems streamline healthcare operations while offering a range of features:

• Patient data management: Improved, personalized patient care helps doctors avoid errors, allowing for better health outcomes.
• Multi-channel support: Multiple communication channels, such as phone, chat, email, SMS, or voicemail, can be integrated into one platform. You can also integrate this with the EHR system, giving required access to a patient’s medical history.
• HIPAA compliance: Contact center platforms like Nextiva adhere to HIPAA regulations, ensuring the privacy and security of patient data.
• AI-powered analytics: Artificial intelligence systems analyze patient data and generate personalized insights and responses, delivering exceptionally satisfactory CX, which is reflected in key metrics like retention and NPS score.

AI-powered virtual assistants

Virtual assistants and chatbots provide good CX by managing routine customer inquiries and collecting initial patient information. This allows healthcare facilities to automate their workflow to some extent while managing a high patient volume.

As well as automation, AI helps with:

• Disease diagnosis
• Personalized treatment plans
• Faster decision-making
• Optimized medicine dosage for every patient
• Patient education and reduced confusion

Most importantly, these assistants prove handy for answering FAQs and giving patients the answers they need throughout their treatment.

Analytics and sentiment analysis

Many CX solutions have sentiment analysis capabilities, helping the admin team gauge patients’ satisfaction. This tool analyzes feedback and social media conversations about the care or treatment received to locate areas for improvement. Some tools include real-time sentiment analysis, which allows agents to adjust their approach during sensitive interactions, improving the quality of communication.

Secure mobile apps and patient portals

Health Information National Trends Survey, a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults, highlights individuals’ preferences for accessing online medical records. The survey clearly states that more individuals preferred using apps to access their medical records in 2022.

Here are a few highlights from the survey.

People are more likely to access healthcare services on their mobile apps, so if you have a patient portal, make sure it’s mobile-friendly for scheduling appointments and accessing telehealth services. Connect the patient portal to your contact center software, as this will allow you to track any confusion that patients often deal with. Overall, you’ll be able to create a more responsive and patient-centric experience in your facility.

Telehealth integration

Integrated telehealth platforms allow patients to connect with providers via video or phone, giving them timely care without a physical visit. According to McKinsey and Company, 60% of patients reported being more satisfied with their most recent telehealth appointment than with an in-person appointment.

Remember that not all patients are the same. Some have low digital literacy, some may not be fluent in English, and some may lack access to the required technology. Contact centers could serve as a hub to help such patients set up telehealth appointments.

Better CX Starts With Nextiva

How you treat your patients makes a difference. Patients expect a good experience and are thrown when they don’t get it. They might not express it vocally, but they will seek other healthcare providers who deliver the desired experience.

When it comes to offering exceptional CX, Nextiva has a tested solution that delivers memorable experiences at scale. It’s equipped with AI to improve CX, allowing healthcare providers to take a more proactive role in patient care.

Nextiva allows you to create a unified communication experience with patients while your internal team can seamlessly collaborate. Its HIPAA-compliant, feature-rich contact center platform allows you to deal with CX issues in modern healthcare, improving the quality of treatment you offer.

Schedule a Nextiva demo to see how you can efficiently offer great patient experiences at scale. 👇