U.S. Healthcare Discussion Misses Key
Point: Customer Service
Americans Demand Healthcare Service and Will Switch Providers to Find
Better Care, According to New Study by Katzenbach Partners
Poor Service Can Drive Patients Out of the System and Hurt
Healthcare Organizations
To Improve Service, Providers Must Do
More Than Talk About Care – They Must
Become “Empathy Engines”
NEW YORK (Business Wire EON) April 10, 2008 --
The current U.S. healthcare discussion misses a key variable: U.S.
healthcare providers may succeed or fail based on the quality of their
customer service.
Poor service drives Americans to switch providers, or drives them away
from better-qualified providers, leading to inefficiency, higher costs
and lower quality of care, according to a new report, including a survey
of 1,003 Americans, by Katzenbach Partners entitled The
Empathy Engine: Achieving Breakthroughs in Patient Service.
Katzenbach Partners is a management consulting firm focused on helping
large companies improve organizational performance.
The report says healthcare providers should respond by ramping up the
quality of their customer service and becoming “empathy
engines” –
transforming their organizations to allow frontline employees to focus
on patient problems and innovate to deliver solutions.
This imperative applies to the full spectrum of healthcare players,
including hospitals, clinics, payers, vendors and pharmacy chains,
according to the report.
“We talk about access to care and that’s
a critical question but it’s only part of the
story,” says Jenny Machida, an Engagement
Manager at Katzenbach Partners and co-author of the report. “It’s
important to bring people into the healthcare system but it’s
equally important to provide an experience that keeps them in the
system, that really solves their problems, and at the same time makes
the entire system more efficient and effective. In practice that means
managing the healthcare organization so that it really listens and cares.”
“The good news is that most healthcare
workers are naturally empathetic,” adds
co-author Traci Entel, a Principal at Katzenbach Partners. “But
the organization needs to be managed to let that empathy come through.”
Americans Care About Healthcare Customer Service and Will Switch
Providers to Find Better Service
Americans have extensive first-hand experience interacting with the
healthcare system. The vast majority – 84
percent – have been in a hospital or clinic
in the past three years, either as a patient (50 percent) or visitor (60
percent), according to Katzenbach Partners’
recent survey of 1,003 Americans. But when their experience is not
positive, they are willing to vote with their feet:
-
One in four Americans has switched or considered switching doctors (26
percent) or hospitals or clinics (23 percent) because of negative
experiences, according to the research.
-
More than half (52 percent) say they choose hospitals and clinics
based on whether they believe employees understand their needs. (Only
one in five choose based on convenience.)
But Americans Feel Healthcare Customer Service is Poor: Some Think It’s
Worse than Airline Service
Americans in large numbers give healthcare customer service poor marks –
and as a result are making decisions that lead them to seek care
elsewhere:
-
One in four Americans say bad experiences have caused them to use
(12%) or think about using (12%) walk-in centers to avoid hospitals,
clinics and doctors’ offices.
-
Healthcare customer service lags behind other industries –
sometimes in surprising and disturbing ways. While it’s
not a surprise that most people (51 percent) think hotels are better
at customer service, nearly half (40 percent) thought banks provided
better customer service than hospitals and clinics. Shockingly, a
significant number (18 percent) think that even airlines are better at
customer service than healthcare providers.
-
These bad perceptions are based on real experiences –
nearly a third of visitors (32 percent) and nearly a quarter of
patients (23 percent) said healthcare employees did not do a good job
of making them feel like their individual needs were understood.
But Great Customer Service Can Solve Major Problems with the
Healthcare System
The impact of poor healthcare customer service goes beyond patient or
visitor satisfaction: It affects the efficiency, quality and cost of
care, and the retention and motivation of highly skilled and scarce
healthcare workers, according to the report. Conversely, great customer
service can lead to major improvements in the healthcare system:
-
Improved customer service has the potential to contain cost by
limiting no-show appointments, the inefficiencies caused by switching
providers (especially duplicated tests), and malpractice suits.
-
Better customer service increases the satisfaction not only of
patients but also of employees. That, in turn, improves retention of
key personnel – in particular nurses, who
are in critically short supply.
-
By making patients more willing to stick with their provider, better
customer service improves continuity of care, which in turn improves
quality of care.
Reform is Possible: Healthcare Providers Can Leapfrog Other
Industries and Become Empathy Engines –
Models for Great Customer Service
Despite the poor marks they currently receive, healthcare providers have
the potential to lead in customer service –
not only matching but leapfrogging other industries, Ms. Entel says.
“Empathy is what draws many workers to the
healthcare industry in the first place,” Ms.
Entel says. “They’re
a reservoir of empathy that healthcare providers can tap. They excel at
improvising and finding small but important solutions. For example,
Texas Children’s Hospital empowers its
employees to solve problems on their own. They acted on their own to
bring in a mechanic to fix a door when a mother and child needed
privacy. At the Mayo Clinic, the staff found a way to schedule
appointments more than six months in advance –
in spite of the limitations of the computer software –
by creating their own improvised system. In each case, this wasn’t
something they were asked to do – it’s
something they did on their own.”
As a result of that natural talent pool, “Healthcare
providers don’t need to radically revamp
their organizations,” Ms. Entel says. “But
they do need to harness and unleash that empathy. Healthcare workers are ‘naturals,’
so healthcare organizations should not just perform on par with other
industries like hospitality, but surpass them and become models for
customer service.”
Healthcare Providers Can Become Empathy Engines by Harnessing
Employees’ Natural Talent and Tapping the “Informal
Organization”
According to the report, healthcare organizations can transform
themselves into empathy engines by tapping into the “informal
organization,” the network of individuals
that exists in every business or institution, outside the formal
organization chart. The informal organization is where most work really
gets done and where most problems are solved.
“The informal organization is central to
healthcare – most care is provided
one-on-one, or in small groups, far away from processes and systems,”
Ms. Machida says. “Healthcare providers can
tap the empathy and energy that lives in the informal organization. The
first step is to recognize that it exists. The next step is to
capitalize on that energy – listen to
employees and empower them to innovate and deliver quality care on the
frontline.”
She adds, “We found a group of employees at
NYU Medical Center that organized their own program to create new
patient service standards. They created meetings and a reward system,
and exerted peer pressure – in a nice way –
to get other employees involved. Senior leaders can tap into that energy
and enthusiasm by putting aside formal branding programs and surveys –
and instead meet with employees in informal settings and truly hear what
they have to say. At Baptist Health Care, executives even participate in
a ‘Work in My Shoes’
program where they swap jobs once a year with frontline workers.”
The report also describes the successful experience of The Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation. It launched a Transforming Care at the Bedside
program at 12 hospitals that increased nurses’
bedside time from 30-40 percent to 70 percent by giving them control of
their own units.
Make Sure the Formal Keeps Up With the Informal
“The formal organization of systems and
structures plays a key role,” Ms. Entel says. “Once
the institution understands what its best employees are doing on the
frontline – their innovations and
contributions – it’s
the task of the formal organization to put systems in place, such as
recognition and training programs, that reinforce empathetic service and
achieve large-scale impact.”
“By managing empathy as a capability –
measuring it and promoting it through hiring, role design and promotion –
the formal organization can make sure that empathy takes root,”
Ms. Machida says. “For example, in developing
recruiting strategies, the formal organization can play a key role by
recognizing – and acting on the insight –
that many people learn empathy in customer service settings outside of
healthcare. A formal program to recruit from the retail or hospitality
industry can help capture that empathy and ensure that empathy becomes
part of the organizational DNA.”
The report describes how The Mayo Clinic put a system in place that
asked candidates for frontline positions to tell a story about when they
were truly empathetic. That helped identify the best performers and also
signaled that great care is more than just medical care –
it’s the capacity to deliver empathetic
patient service.
“Empathy is not much talked about in the
healthcare reform debate,” says Ms. Entel. “But
it’s the hidden factor that, once you address
it, can transform the healthcare system.”
For a copy of the report, “The
Empathy Engine: Achieving Breakthroughs in Patient Service,”
or to schedule an interview with Ms. Entel or Ms. Machida, contact
Alexandra Corriveau of Sommerfield Communications at (212) 255-8386 or alexandra@sommerfield.com.
About Katzenbach Partners
Katzenbach Partners LLC works with leading global companies to achieve
breakthroughs in organizational performance. The firm applies new
thinking about how organizations work, serving companies across
industries to shape strategy, improve operations and effect change.
Katzenbach Partners is building a different kind of consulting firm, one
that integrates strategic problem solving with pragmatic insight into
people and organizations. http://www.katzenbach.com.
MULTIMEDIA GALLERY http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=5655130
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