If you want to improve the patient experience — and your patient satisfaction and HCAHPS scores — here’s a good place to start: Reconsider how your hospital or practice thinks about time. And get to work swapping a patient-centered approach to time for your provider-centered viewpoint.  To see this in action, try a quick phone call to Cleveland Clinic. Here’s precisely what you’ll hear, after just a bit of voice jail navigation:  “Thank you for calling Cleveland Clinic. Would you like to be seen today?”  And they mean it. They do “about a million” same-day appointments a year, according to James Merlino, MD, Cleveland Clinic’s Chief Experience Officer.  Now, doing a good job in healthcare does take time. Scans take time to read properly. Cultures take time to grow. Thoughtful diagnoses and effective discharges absolutely take time.  The last thing I want to do is turn your hospital or practice into the healthcare equivalent of a fast food joint.  But some of the wait times your patients suffer through don’t add anything to successful clinical outcomes. And the reason you’re making patients wait? Probably it’s partly because you’ve always done things this way, and everyone else in healthcare is making patients wait as well.  Well, you can’t use that last rationalization anymore. Not if you’ve been watching what Cleveland Clinic has been doing on the timeliness front.  Cleveland Clinic – Miller Family Pavilion  Let’s go back to listening to Cleveland Clinic, and that mind-blowing greeting:  “Thank you for calling Cleveland Clinic. Would you like to be seen today?” (After 4PM the greeting rolls over to”Would you like to be seen tomorrow?”)  This is for real. According to Dr. Merlino,  “Anybody calling [Cleveland Clinic] for an appointment for any specialty can be seen today.”  Getting people in to see a doctor the same day they call is an extreme and extraordinary move by Cleveland Clinic to take patient satisfaction to a new level.  Which is something that’s come a long way since the bad old days, when their incoming CEO, Toby Cosgrove, would joke, “Patients come to us for high quality care– but they don’t like us very much. “ (Which wasn’t much of a joke, really. When Cosgrove took the reins at Cleveland Clinic in 2004, patient satisfaction was in the lowest 10 percent of the nation.)  An eye on the millennial generation of patients  While nobody of any age likes to wait, this commitment to speed comes partly from Cleveland Clinic’s eyes being trained specifically on the incoming millennial generation of patients. (Millennials are a crucial generation of customers for any business—including healthcare—to consider. They are 80 million strong in the U.S., making them larger than the baby boom, and much larger than Generation X, the generation that immediately preceded them. And their expectations are quite different, being the first generation to take the internet, and smartphones, entirely for granted. A historical reality which changes their perception of time, convenience, and more.)  They pull this off… how? Well, the same-day appointment commitment required Cleveland Clinic to get through some operational hurdles. Actually, Dr. Merlino corrects me on this: “‘operational hurdles’ is an understatement.” An extraordinary amount of work has had to be put into “managing the flow and ensuring we have the capacity.”  The same-day appointment promise is also dependent on a sophisticated triage process.  In other words: I can’t just call up and say  “I have a headache. I want to see a neurosurgeon.”  Well, actually, I can call in and say that—and they’ll be ready to deal with it. Here’s what happens: I’m taken through a series of questions on the phone; depending on how I answer those questions, the Cleveland Clinic telephone agent will be able to determine whom I should see, and will ensure I get that appointment today.
Cleveland Clinic's Chief Experience (CX) Officer James Merlino and patient experience consultant Micah Solomon on how to boost hospital patient satisfaction and HCAHPS scores through millennial-friendly customer experience initiatives.