Investing (not MONEY) in Patient Experience Can Help Hospital Revenue

The patient experience is a critical factor that sometimes gets ignored in the hospital setting (or maybe not… but it DOES get forgotten). The primary focus of a hospital is to heal the sick and cure the injured. However, hospitals are also businesses interested in not only covering their costs but making a profit as well. As a result, the patient experience has to be kept as a (top) priority.

The days when patients went to the doctor’s office with very little knowledge and some semblance of understanding regarding their particular ailment, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment are loooong gone; everything the doctors said (or didn’t say) was once regarded as just the way it was and had to be. When patients left that 15-minute doctor’s visit they were armed only with the information and options that their doctor provided to them. For the doctors, the only real-time information they could provide was by drawing from what they knew from experience and then simply telling their patients that once the tests results came back, they’d be contacted.

It’s a mistake to think that formalized efforts to measure hospital patient satisfaction are just another government intrusion. Programs like the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Survey can not only bring you direct financial rewards (and who doesn’t want more of that?!), they can help your organization excel in the areas of ongoing growth and profitability.

Beginning on October 1, 2012 several healthcare reform measures will kick in. 

One reform measure hospitals have been preparing for is value-based purchasing, which is where hospitals will receive Medicare-reimbursement scores based on the level of care they deliver (patient satisfaction). This means that if a hospital receives low patient satisfaction scores, there will be reductions in Medicare reimbursements.