HCB News: What can healthcare providers do to get more actionable insight from patients and physicians? How can they create and monitor a successful growth strategy?
CB: There are several steps they can take to understand the choices of their patients and physicians. First, they need to get focused. Most strategic plans take a broad approach to strategy that’s difficult to measure and monitor. Zeroing in on consumer choice helps leaders break down larger growth goals into several smaller initiatives, each of which can be measured and acted on.
The second step is to understand choice. In healthcare today, it all comes down to choice. Even if your hospital is the only one in town, local patients still have the option to postpone care—in fact, that may be one of the biggest competitors a hospital has.
HCB News: What are the other steps?
CB: The next two steps are connected—first, use data to drive decisions and second, measure ongoing impact. In both steps, you need to cut through long, boring research reports to get to the right information. In terms of driving decisions, you want to make sure you can easily visualize the data, segment it in meaningful ways, understand what it means, and put it to work. And on the measurement side, even the best research studies only give you a point-in-time view of the world. Healthcare organizations need to continually monitor changes to consumer preferences and decision-making.
HCB News: How does the information you’re describing differ from what healthcare organizations get from consumer surveys like HCAHPS and Press Ganey?
CB: HCAHPS and Press Ganey deal with the patient experience, which is very important. But patient satisfaction is only one data point to consider when creating growth strategy. The assessments you named don’t seek to understand the perspective of prospective patients, and they don’t capture how choices are made to go to your hospital or your competitors’. The bottom line is that you can have great patient satisfaction scores and still have lackluster patient volume growth.
HCB News: Can you provide an example of how growth strategy planning can impact patient volume?
CB: Sure. We did a case study on a Midwestern hospital that was planning to add a new private room wing as part of their ED unit. This was in reaction to the private rooms added by a competitive hospital. However, after gathering some targeted customer research about how patients in their area choose which ED to go to, they uncovered that a new facility wasn’t the biggest driver of patient choice. So they scrapped the new construction in order to focus on the areas they learned were more important to their community. As you can imagine, they saved a lot of money with this decision. Even more important, they increased patient volume by 7 percent year over year.
