The Growing Importance of “Patient Experience”
A couple of days ago, I was talking to a good friend of mine, the highly knowledgeable executive recruiter Gayle Parker, about some thinking I had been doing lately related to the concept of “patient experience.” My thoughts were prompted by a commercial I’d seen aired several times on network TV by Merck.
In this commercial, various individuals offer up sound bites indicating that they are not a demographic, a statistic, a target market or even a patient. Rather, they are people who happen to have Type 2 diabetes. The message of their collective protestation was clear. They were tired of being dealt with impersonally, of having their condition treated rather than themselves, and they wanted to have a much warmer experience surround their treatment process. Voice-over at the end of the commercial makes it clear that Merck is not only working on medications but also the patient experience.
Gayle resonated to this line of discussion, since her daughter is part of the staff at the Cleveland Clinic and had mentioned to her mother that that institution proudly has an Office of Patient Experience. More substantively, patient experience is one of the clinic’s major strategic goals; it has appointed a chief experience officer; and has mounted a number of programs to enhance the physical, emotional and spiritual nature of everyone... |
