The importance of anticipating the patient experience

I have been involved in a few conversations of late in which people--patients and healthcare providers alike--still see experience as a reactive or passive engagement. They have expressed concerns that the idea is becoming just another silo in an already over-segmented healthcare world. This is not surprising, for as humans we look for means to control or understand what is new, big and even boundless in many ways, and we are also apt to react to situations more often than plan. But I believe we overlook a significant opportunity in doing this.

This perspective is elevated for me as I anticipate an upcoming patient and family experience myself. With the pending arrival of our new child in the short days ahead, I am already thinking about the baby and my wife's care. Will they be cared for and will they be safe? How will we be treated, and how responsive will they be to our needs? What will they communicate, and how with they do it? What have they done to help us in advance of our encounter, and what will follow?

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In our case, a "planned" healthcare experience, we can think about these questions, and people often do whether visiting their physician's office, preparing for a procedure, living with the journey of a chronic illness, entering a long-term care facility and in many more scenarios. As I have talked to patients who have had emergency situations, this too becomes part of the cacophony of thoughts filling their heads after asking "will I be OK, and what will happen to me?" Whether we are aware of it or not, we anticipate our experiences as patients and families. They are shaped by the stories we hear, the experiences we have had in the past and the way in which organizations and their people have engaged with us to date. If we believe that to be true, then we must ensure our healthcare organizations are also focusing on anticipating experiences as well.

So how do we anticipate experience? I believe it starts with the fundamental of acknowledging that experience is all a patient or family member encounters in engaging with an organization. It reaches well beyond the clinical encounter grounded in quality, safety and service moments to what I have offered before as the three Ps driving excellence in experience efforts: PEOPLE and the interactions they provide, PROCESSES and the efficiencies they exemplify and PLACE and the environments they create.

If we start there, then experience is something we have to address on more than one dimension. The first is on organizational readiness as framed by the concepts I just mentioned and the second is on organizational responsiveness. Readiness is all we do to ensure we have the people, processes and systems in place to ensure the best in experience for every person, every time. I have written about this at length, but reinforce here that anticipating experience is about ensuring we have all the operational considerations in place to be effective at what we do at all times.

We then must expand our conversation of anticipating experience to combat the very challenges I mention above. If we solely focus on readiness, we run the risk of creating another operational silo that loses its very value in reinforcing that experience is all we do in healthcare. For that reason we need to ensure a clear commitment to responsiveness. This in its simplest form is recognizing that for all the standardizing or processes we can put in place, every patient and family encounter is unlike any that came before.

It should also not be equated to reacting, because in its very nature responsiveness is grounded in a forward-thinking and proactive engagement with others. For that reason we need mechanisms for engaging with those in our care whether in planned or unplanned situations. We must create opportunities to acknowledge the individual(s) we are ultimately caring for, understanding their needs and expectations, communicating what is and is not realistic and honoring the individuality they bring. This may be the most important, yet most challenging aspect of achieving the pinnacle of experience excellence we aspire to.

As I anticipate the experience of my family in the coming days, I have great faith in the organization and the systems they will have in place to support us. I have a belief and in fact the expectation that they are ready to do what is right. It will be in their responsiveness, in their ability to anticipate the experience we hope to have and they look to provide, that will make the biggest difference.

Jason A. Wolf, Ph.D., is president of The Beryl Institute, a global community of practice focused on patient experience improvement and founding editor of Patient Experience Journal. Follow Jason @jasonawolf, The Beryl Institute @berylinstitute and Patient Experience Journal @pxjournal on Twitter.