The Productivity Element

The Productivity aspect of exemplary patient care focuses on the services you offer to the marketplace, your patients. In healthcare, we provide our patients services. First, let’s examine what a service is. A service is the combining together various materials, equipment, people, a fund of knowledge, and technology to create benefits for your customers or patients. These services include not only the benefits of what you do for them but the feelings your customer experience as they receive your services.

The Two Parts of Any Service

Any service can be thought to possess two separate parts - the outcome and the experience. The Productivity element concerns itself with the experience of the patient. The Performance element focuses on the outcomes of the service rendered to the customer.

With the Productivity part, there are a few things to consider as you develop your service. The first step is to know and understand the mission and purpose of your organization. What you do and why you do it will help guide you as you develop services for your customers. Once you understand the nature of your organizations work, your people and customer can they understand and appreciate what you provide.

Be Efficient

It doesn’t matter what service industry you’re participating in, your customers will spend time waiting. In healthcare, it’s simply part of the patient experience. Time spent waiting could be considered time wasted by your patients. The most common patient complaint about many of the physician’s I’ve worked with is the perceived value the physician places on the patients time. In fact, I would argue many of us don’t value time as much as we should. Therefore, we should make the best use of our time and that time of our patients. Focusing on efficiency is how we will do that.

To be efficient requires you to understand the entirety of your process fully. You will need to understand each step, why it is there, and the purpose it serves. You will need to understand the order of the steps in the process. You will need to know where the chokepoints are and if they are flexible. Minimizing your patient’s wait time is the an excellent way to delight your patients.

Delight Your Patient

The patient experience is an essential part of the service you offer. It is important to design your services around the emotional response you want your patient to leave the clinic with. Spend some time thinking about how each phase of the process affects the emotional state of your patient. What emotions does each step invoke in your patient as they move through your processes? What emotional responses do you want them to experience? Once you’ve identified the desired emotions, you can design your processes to invoke those specific emotional responses.

Perhaps the most important facet of delighting your patients is their expectations of the experience. Their expectations help define the experience of your practice. Just as in a nice fancy restaurant or a movie, you walk into that business with expectations. Your patient does the same thing with your business.

You will want to help establish expectations for your patient. These expectations are set in part by sharing your mission and purpose with them. What you do and why you do it should be readily perceived by the patient from the moment they enter your practice as well as throughout the entire visit. Your people’s words, actions, behaviors, and attitudes should remind your patients of your mission and purpose. Furthermore, each step of the process of the patient experience has an objective that supports the mission and purpose.

There’s a big difference between delighting the patient and sucking up to them. Delighting the patient means you’ve met and exceeded the expectations you’ve helped establish at the beginning of the process. Sucking up to them is when you are just doing whatever the patient wants without regard to the benefit it provides the patient. It becomes easier to say no to a patient request when it does align with your mission and purpose if you’ve displayed your mission and purpose consistently throughout their visit. Saying no to a request that doesn’t support the mission and purpose will be easy and should come as no shock to the patient.

Make It Easy on Your People

As you design processes, make the processes as easy as possible for your people. If steps in the process need to be rearranged, then do that. Frustrated employees are more apt to share their negative attitude with the patients, whether they know it or not. Everyone and everything should be united in the attitude and image your organization projects.

Involve your people in the design of the processes as well. Most people want to do great work and if a step in the process hinders that, listen to them. If you’re hired great people, then you should have a plethora of good ideas. Avoid thinking they are merely trying to get out of work as they make suggestions. Remember they are attempting to be as efficient and productive as possible. If you know what you’re doing and understand the nature of your work, it will be easy to let your customer and your people understand this as well. Doing this is a huge step towards providing exemplary patient care.