Experience of Care: Put People First Always

How would you lead differently if healthcare was about health and people? Wait, isn’t it? Mostly? It’s a given, right? Not necessarily.

If the focus is on people and health, I think we would be obsessively focused on the patient’s experience with care. And there are many experiences – big buckets might include: finding care, accessing care, getting care, feeling connected to your team, paying for care. We have plenty to learn from other industries about transparency, love, caring and connection.

There are immensely talented people in healthcare and they bring expertise in clinical care and operations, business, finance, and more. Our best leaders bring all of this AND are first focused on people.

Here are a few keys to success:

Make people your #1 priority.

Healthcare is an industry that is for people and delivered by people. Your team’s health and engagement make everything happen. When you connect to their purpose and demonstrate your care for them, creativity and innovation flows. Do your leaders and teams train and continuously learn in customer service and caring like it is mission critical? Do you treat it like continuing medical education for physicians? Or even like a stethoscope – you cannot give care without it.

For the people we serve, they are the consumers of our care (yes, consumers), they have a choice and we have a lot to learn from other industries about loyalty, loving and trust. And healthcare is often unaffordable. Those we serve typically don’t know the cost of the care they are receiving until after it is completed. Trust, one might argue has been the currency of medicine. And, as an industry, we are not always holding up our end of the relationship in the clinical, operations and financial areas. “Trust me” is not a strategy and demonstrating our genuine interest in and actions to meet the patient’s health goals requires multichannel, digitally-enabled love.

Listen.

When I was a medical student, we were told by our professors to listen to the patient. As a pediatrician, I was keen to assess the level of concern of a parent or the patient themselves – it rarely let me down. Our industry has built our facilities and our care delivery to suit our needs. Even today, we see elaborate development of centers of excellence, outpatient surgery centers and more and the patient is often minimally engaged in the design and process of care. 

Their input is often limited to wall art and chairs. Imagine if you had the patient co- design the surgery pre-op white board,the process of handoffs and the visuals used to educate. Many of us do some of this and not enough of us truly embed this critical team member in all the most important work.

Be bold.

Only a rare few people might have asked for or even imagined online banking when we thought drive throughs or ATMs were the future of banking. For decades we have had the patient come to us and at a time that worked for the system and the provider. Traditional office and hospital thinking do not get to online banking. How would we design care if we aimed to meet our patients where they are? We might leverage all available assets and digital capabilities – yes, video visits and so much more.

Online forms (minimized!), asynchronous communication/questions, population view of chronic diseases that have experts monitoring and addressing risk directly, behavioral nudging of patients to take their health into their own hands, care at home and more. These tactics put people first.

Ask who could be left behind.

No longer can health teams design care without the patient voice and without asking the question ‘who could be left behind.’ Progressive health systems are looking at their processes and outcomes and are finding geographic, gender, race, ethnic and other potential gaps that require asking how, why and what we can do to improve. Intermountain Healthcare’s women’s health team asked the question: who is not getting to pre-natal appointments by looking at deliveries, clinic no-shows and late starts for pre-natal care. This led to a partnership with a local community group to listen with curiosity for barriers that they are crashing down.

Game on

Put people first. Listen. Think boldly - no one asked for a car when we had horses and carts as transportation. We take care of people, let’s take care of our people. Please consider less use of the word patient (yes, there are times that is appropriate) so we don’t add vulnerabilities and we encourage self-efficacy. Step into whole person care, accountability for total cost of care, and health is a game changer. Now is the time.