HFMA VIEWS

Casey Nolan
Navigant Consulting, Inc.

Watching the Rolling Stones perform during the Super Bowl half time extravaganza recently made me think about several seemingly unrelated things. My first thought was, are these guys still out there performing? They must be close to qualifying for Medicare!  As I watched the Stones perform, however, I also thought about the transition of the “Boomer” generation into their “golden years” and what that means for healthcare organizations striving to deliver outstanding customer service (in addition to superb quality health care). 

One of the things that occurred to me was that virtually every healthcare organization seems to compare itself to the wrong benchmarks in terms of how well they satisfy their customers. Regardless of which patient satisfaction system or vendor they use, healthcare organizations tend to compare their patient satisfaction scores with those of their “peers.” The only problem with this is that their real “peers” are not other healthcare organizations but other service providers! After all, how many hospitals does a typical patient use in their lifetime? So when consumers are assessing their level of satisfaction with the service they received from their healthcare provider, they are likely to be comparing that level of service to the level of service they received from other service providers they use—like Amazon.com, ebay, any of the major banks, the web travel or shopping services, all of the major upscale hotel chains, etc. 

Just think of it in this way: you can go on line today, book a flight around the world, check in and print your boarding pass at home, shop for hotel and car deals on the web, fly across the world and use your ATM card to get money in virtually any city in the developed world. Yet, in a hospital, you often can’t get from the admissions department to radiology without having to re-register. And as for booking something on line or price shopping, well, let’s just say that healthcare providers lag the rest of the service industries. As a result, while a healthcare provider’s patient satisfaction scores may benchmark favorably to their peer group, it is likely that they fall far short in comparison to other service providers. 

So my bold proposition is that instead of assessing your performance against other healthcare providers of similar size and case mix intensity, you should assess your performance against that of the other service organizations that your customers, especially those picky, persnickety, profitable “boomers” patronize.  In health care we talk a great deal about satisfaction, but to paraphrase the Stones it is unlikely that our customers are getting any satisfaction.