Project: The Ideal Customer Encounter
The Situation:
A clinic based ambulatory care network associated with a multi hospital system realized that it was operating in an increasingly competitive marketplace. It recognized that both customers and payers were becoming more demanding as their understanding of what constitutes excellent customer service grew. They understood that positively responding to these new demands could provide a competitive advantage to the ambulatory care sites.
| The Solution:
A task force made up of a wide range of clinic personnel from the clinic's multiple sites met semi-monthly with consultants. In addition, interviews were held with operating managers and physicians and several focus groups were conducted. These focus groups were composed of people with considerable experience in navigating through the health system. The people selected were spouses, children, parents of regular patient/customers or were patient/customers themselves.
The focus groups indicated the following:
Even though they all had significant experience working inside the healthcare system to obtain care, they felt that delays, errors, difficulties in communication and scheduling were much greater than they should experience.
Their experience with other types of healthcare providers like dentists and veterinarians was much more positive. Those providers were better at scheduling, being on time for examines, providing wellness counseling and other preventive health measures. Recommendations:
Strengthen the Patient Access Initiative already in progress so as to redesign the access system by the end of the year.
A detailed, prioritized information technology (I.T.) plan for ambulatory should be undertaken as soon as possible. Many of the ideal customer encounter initiatives require IT support.
Ambulatory care sites require focused, coordinated, consistent leadership. Currently, individual ambulatory site services report only to their hospital based department, there is no ambulatory function based leadership.
Using templates supplied by the consultants, continue internal work on developing specific, measurable customer service standards.
Improve wayfinding through the use of preregistration information and telephone calls.
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