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This article is sponsored by NRC Health.
In the evolving landscape of health care, our consumers, patients, and workforce are undergoing significant demographic changes. At the heart of these changes are generational differences in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. These generational influences don’t override each unique individual; however, they can and do shape a myriad of preferences, values, and expectations. These shifts impact every aspect of our lives in these modern times, including how health care is delivered and consumed.
Delivering quality care now and in the future requires a focus not only on the clinical quality of care, but also on the quality of the experiences we deliver on both sides of the stethoscope. The complexities of these modern times require us to be intentional in understanding the challenges or ease of current experiences and in designing new experiences of care. They call us to keep individual needs at the forefront of the care experience for both patients and our workforce while also minding the gaps in care generated by macro-level differences in generational expectations.
Health care organizations currently serve six generations of patients and employ predominantly four generations—yet it isn’t always clear if and how we are designing patient and workforce experiences with generation-based expectations in mind. Granted, not everyone identifies with a prescribed generational cohort, and some feel this attaches unnecessary and less-than-true labels to large groups of people, thus diluting individual expression. However, looking at behaviors and preferences when we cohort by age (and thus, by generation), we see some clear evolution in both consumers and our workforce.
Through an extensive comment analysis conducted by NRC Health experts, we have gleaned valuable insights from over five million patient feedback surveys over the last year. Our findings reveal that older, more experienced patients place a high value on providers being fully focused on them during a health care experience. They are perhaps more likely to notice (and not appreciate) multi-tasking. Our younger patients, on the other hand, report placing a higher importance on presence and having a personal relationship with a provider. Kindness, honesty, humor, and shared interests or life experiences are also especially notable to this cohort. It is important to note that regardless of age, all patients place primacy on being involved in their care.
All of this is to say that providers who are intentional about being focused, present, and open to understanding what their patients have to say about their health are more likely to create a mutually positive experience.
Another difference we can see when we look broadly across feedback surveys for both patients and employees is a notable decline in response rates from generation to generation. The highest response rates come from our two oldest generations (Silent Generation/Boomers) at 36 percent. Each generation thereafter drops 10–15 percent, and our youngest patients (Gen Z) have a response rate of less than 10 percent. We see this same pattern when looking at employee/physician engagement survey response rates. It is clear that as culture has shifted from traditional (analog) to digital forms of communication, so has our willingness to provide feedback via traditional channels.
We live in a world of fast-paced change, and we can all agree that culture changes over time. In our communities today, we have people who grew up and learned to access, consume, and deliver health care in traditional (analog) ways. We also have people who have never lived in an analog world but rather are digital natives, growing up utilizing technology to navigate the world (including health care). And we have those whose childhoods were analog but who experienced the digital age during young adulthood when they were becoming professionals and consumers; these people have generally had to be the most adaptive to changes in technology. It’s not a surprise, then, that among these different groups, we have diverse preferences, values, expectations, and behaviors driven by broad culture shifts—largely those in technology—and impacting us all.
Next-generation Human Understanding takes cognizance of these differences and addresses the challenges that arise from them within a simple framework.
1. Act now—equip and empower teams to deliver the best experiences today.
- Understand the journeys of both patients and our workforce, and seek to improve or completely re-design the journey in a human-centered way, as opposed to fixing one problem or point in a silo.
- Develop steadfast curiosity. One of the core tenets of curiosity is listening to understand. When we listen to understand the needs of patients and the workforce, it is vital that we approach communication as a skill. Patients have varying preferences for communication styles, ranging from traditional in-person conversations to messaging on their mobile phones. The same is true of our workforce. In this digital age, where nearly instantaneous responses are expected, it is important to ensure we make room for both traditional and digital listening/communication and ensure easy-to-access, actionable feedback, as close to the experience as possible.
2. Plan for the near term—co-design experiences with key stakeholders, to be implemented in the next year or two.
- Make it easy to capture ideas from patients, providers, and the larger workforce. The best ideas come from those who experience what it’s like to consume or deliver care, not from those who spend the majority of their time in a boardroom. Develop listening programs that allow those on both sides of the stethoscope to contribute through modern, sophisticated listening and co-design methods utilizing modes that are personalized to each individual’s preference. Bring this deep listening into the boardroom and include insights and ideas in organizational decision-making.
3. Prepare for what’s next—develop innovative, system-level strategies to anticipate and meet the needs of future healthcare workers and consumers.
- Keep a steady eye on your community and the shifting expectations of consumers, patients, and your workforce. This enables you to be proactive and agile in terms of both short- and long-term planning.
- Utilize macro-level data to surface current trends and stay ahead of what’s coming to help guide both strategies and tactics.
As we navigate these transformative times in healthcare, the key to success lies in our ability to understand and adapt to the diverse needs of patients and the workforce across generations. By embracing innovative strategies and fostering a culture of listening and co-design, we can create a healthcare experience that truly resonates with everyone involved.
For a deeper dive into these insights and strategies, we invite you to explore our full report:
Next-generation Human Understanding: A playbook for healthcare experience management
In this special sponsored episode, we welcome Jennifer Baron, chief experience officer at NRC Health. The discussion focuses on generational differences in health care expectations, challenges in aligning patient and employee experiences, and practical strategies for reimagining care practices. Jennifer shares valuable insights on building trust, improving communication, and fostering empathy to create more human health care experiences.
VISIT SPONSOR → https://nrchealth.com/
SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST → https://kevinmd.com/podcast
Transcript
Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we have a special sponsored episode from NRC Health. We welcome Jennifer Baron, chief experience officer. NRC Health builds a health care experience management platform with next-gen AI that drives the most human health care experiences for everyone. Today we’ll be discussing strategies for patient-centered and employee-focused care. Find out more at NRCHealth.com. That’s NRCHealth.com. The link will be in the show notes. Jennifer, welcome to the show.
Jennifer Baron: Thank you, Kevin. It’s great to be here.
Kevin Pho: So let’s start by sharing a bit about NRC Health.
Jennifer Baron: Yeah. So NRC Health is an organization that has been in health care for over 40 years, truly focused on our mission, which is to bring human understanding to health care. We work with, or have worked with, over 10,000 health care organizations across the country to improve experiences for patients, the workforce, consumers, and communities. And as you mentioned, we recently launched an AI-enabled platform that will allow us to create a more natural way to collect and analyze feedback, and help us better lean together into creating and restoring sacred human connections in health care.
Kevin Pho: All right. So today’s conversation is going to focus on strategies for patient-centered and employee-focused care, and we’re going to divide this conversation into three broad themes. The first theme is generational influences and differences in health care. So Jennifer, I want to first ask: How do different generations approach health care, and what are the most significant generational differences in expectations of care?
Jennifer Baron: Yes. So I think as humans, we all approach everything that we do in life from a position of comfort, of what we’re comfortable with. So when we think about different approaches to health care, and we think about that generationally, it’s pretty easy to start to see it. Our older generations, our most experienced consumers and patients, typically have a more traditional view of health care. Think about what their first experiences as young adults were in health care, the way that you accessed health care. You might actually search for a provider using a phone book, talking to your friends and neighbors, and then actually physically walking to a phone, making a phone call, writing down your appointment, driving to the appointment. Everything was very analog, and that was the traditional model, and kind of what we are seeing is that older generations are most comfortable with that. Their preferred approach is that traditional model.
We also have folks that are more in sort of an adaptable space, so Gen X is a great example of that. I’m actually a part of Gen X. It was the start of the internet, so although there weren’t a lot of online experiences, it was still the traditional model. Gen X was really the first health care consumer, in that we were the first generation to have access to doing broader research and getting more information through the internet.
When we look at millennials, millennials were kind of the first digital natives, the first generation to grow up with more technology. As millennials became health care consumers as young adults, we started to see, nine or 10 years ago, an uptick in online scheduling and more of a shift to digital tools in order to meet the needs of that generation, whose primary focus was digital. Now we’re moving into Gen Z becoming health care consumers for themselves. Young adults, as they are entering this world, have never lived in a world without a digital-first experience, right? Everything is at their fingertips, very easy, and they have all of the information that they need very quickly at their fingertips.
So that is sort of how we see preferences in health care evolving across generations, and it creates, right now at this point in our history, a complex environment for us in health care to navigate, because we have to meet the needs of all of those different approaches and preferences.
Kevin Pho: And I certainly see exactly what you’re saying. I’m a primary care internal medicine physician, and normally when I see a new patient, the first thing I ask is how they found me. And those generational differences certainly come into play, because some of the older patients find me through word of mouth, right, through friends and family. But you talk about some of the younger patients, and they say, “Oh, I found you by Googling you,” and “I found you just from some of these social media podcasts.” So what you’re saying, I’m definitely seeing that firsthand. So do you find that there are certain aspects of health care that are valued by older generations, and how do you think they contrast with those of younger generations?
Jennifer Baron: Yeah. So we actually recently did a meta-analysis of patient feedback. We looked at over 5 million patient feedback surveys that we received between November of last year and October of this year. And first of all, I think it’s interesting that we saw, as a shared value across all generations, being involved in their care. In every single generation, through that qualitative analysis of comments on these surveys, that shone through loud and clear. They want to be involved; they want to have input in decision-making. Now, that might look different from generation to generation or individual to individual, right, the level of involvement, but they all want to be involved.
What we saw from our older generations, Gen X through the Silent Generation, was also a strong leaning into a value of focus and paying attention. So they want a provider that, when they are there, is fully present. They’re probably less willing to be OK with multitasking, and when we think about the EMR and that screen sort of creating a barrier, we can see that the older generations are less tolerant of that. They want full focus. And also, no big surprise, probably because they do consume more health care, they place a greater value on a provider being prepared with their medical history when they meet with them, which also is consistent with that personal attention.
What we saw from younger generations in that analysis was a high placement of value on what I would say are more relational attributes. So a provider that is approachable, a provider that maybe brings humor into the conversation, is a real person, and has shared interests with them. And a high value on courtesy and respect, so kindness and humility and honesty also kind of came through in those themes.
So I think that also shows a little bit of the evolution that has occurred, from older generations that, again, started consuming health care in a more traditional model, where the provider was kind of the voice that was listened to, and that’s what patients did, whatever the provider suggested, that’s what they did, primarily, to younger generations, who are really looking for more of a partner in their care. And our younger generations do have more of a focus on wellness, and so they’re really looking for that partnership from a provider and a health system.
Kevin Pho: And when you said earlier that a lot of these patients wanted more input in terms of their care, more of a shared decision-making approach, what exactly would that look like, according to your surveys?
Jennifer Baron: Yeah, this is where individualism, I think, comes into play, and personalization, and how organizations and providers can start to think differently about how we actually collect feedback from all of our patients to understand how they want to be involved in decision-making. We don’t see a broad theme on that “how.” We just know that it is something that comes through in these analyses as being important. That can be a very personalized thing. There might be patients that you have in your practice, for example, who would define that as, “I just want everything to be explained to me, and to have a good understanding, and to be able to keep that communication open,” whereas you may have another patient, regardless of age, who wants to have a dialogue, who has done their own research, who wants to be able to bring that research into the conversation, get your opinion and advice on that, and come to a common treatment plan.
Kevin Pho: You mentioned earlier that Gen Z patients are the first generation that are digital natives. How has that digital transformation in that generation impacted patient care?
Jennifer Baron: Yeah. So I think it has driven a lot of our digital front door work that we’ve done, and that is really catering primarily to the younger generations, both millennials and Gen Z. But when we look at younger millennials and Gen Z, I actually don’t think that evolution is complete. It’s going to continue, and those generations will continue to challenge us to think of new ways to deliver health care and health care experiences.
I mentioned online scheduling before. That was an improvement in experience that was made really specifically in modern times for that digital age and that digital culture. As we are moving into more of an AI-centric culture, we are starting to see applications, and this is again probably a whole other show, and I’m sure you’ve had lots of conversations about this, but even ambient AI, which is now being implemented in a lot of practices, is really designed, again, think of the values that we talked about: relationship building, being more relational with patients, being more fully present. Ambient AI is an application of that, and it is very comfortable to younger generations, because their whole lives have been lived digitally and they’re very comfortable in that space. And so it does allow for that relationship building to occur in new ways. It kind of lifts that screen from the room.
Kevin Pho: Now, with that context, where different generations may have differing expectations of what ideal health care should be, how can health care systems adapt to meet some of these dueling goals that different generations have during an office visit?
Jennifer Baron: Yeah. So “dueling goals,” I like that. That’s the first time I’ve heard that, and I think that’s a great term for what everyone is feeling, because the reality is we have to live in this world of ensuring great experiences that are both analog and digital, and allowing people to choose their preference, right?
So I think what we can do as organizations is figure out how we understand the journeys that all people are taking. So think about, for example, a person who is accessing care at a clinic, maybe this primary care practice. From the arrival to the discharge and leaving the space, what does that journey look like? And where do you have an opportunity to offer digital tools that will meet some of the preferences of our primary patients, while still allowing for an analog channel for our other generations that maybe aren’t interested in using those tools?
I was just talking to one of our partners in the last couple of weeks who has implemented an e-check-in. So you drive up, it’s on the app, you say, “I’m here,” and it takes care of all of your check-in process. You don’t even have to go to the desk; they know you’re there. Whereas that’s great for younger generations, some older generations might not like it. Some people in older generations might like it and use it. But having those tools and ways to kind of shift in and out of analog and digital right now is what we really have to design for across those journeys.
Kevin Pho: You’re listening to a special sponsored episode from NRC Health, discussing strategies for patient-centered and employee-focused care. Find out more at NRCHealth.com. That’s NRCHealth.com, and the link will be in the show notes.
The second theme, Jennifer, I want to talk about is the patient and employee experience: gaps, challenges, and trust. So how can health care organizations become more intentional about both the patient experience and the employee experience?
Jennifer Baron: So I think, first of all, it’s a decision that has to be made, and an understanding that we are in the age of experience. We live in an experience economy; there’s a great book with that title. But I think more and more with younger generations, we do see this primacy being given to the life experiences that we’re having, and people really leaning into that. Health care has been a little slow to make the decision that we really have to understand how to intentionally design meaningful experiences for both our workforce and our employees.
As humans, we are all having experiences all day long. That’s what life is. It’s a series of experiences that are either good or bad, meaningful or not meaningful. And I think in health care, historically, we have often left experience up to chance. We have designed our processes around what we need in order to deliver care, without being as intentional as we could be about really understanding the actions and the touch points that we are requiring people on both sides of the stethoscope to take on a daily basis.
So I’ll go back to understanding the journeys. I think health organizations can start with a problem, and instead of fixing that one little problem, look at that problem as part of a holistic journey, understand how it fits in with the journey, and fix that problem as part of that whole journey. Because sometimes we fix a problem in a silo, and then we create other problems for other parts of the journey, unbeknownst to us, because we aren’t looking at it in that way.
Kevin Pho: So what are some of the barriers that health care organizations face when talking about and meeting both the patient experience and the employee experience?
Jennifer Baron: Well, I think one barrier is leadership development. We don’t necessarily always include this way of thinking, sort of a human-centered design way of thinking, in our leadership development programs, and it is a true leadership capability as we’re living in this current world and as we move forward into the future. So it is a leader’s responsibility, ultimately, to understand the experiences of both the people their teams are serving and the teams themselves. And that is a skill. It isn’t something that’s natural to everyone, and we often end up promoting great individual contributors who have done a great job in that space. We put them in a leadership role, and we don’t teach them that skill of really understanding those experiences and how to design meaningful experiences in a human-centered way. So I think that is one barrier. We haven’t really moved into this human-centered design phase in health care as holistically as we should.
The other barrier, which we have been talking about in this industry for as long as I’ve been in it, which has been over 30 years, is silos. We still haven’t effectively managed to break down those silos. And again, if we put the right processes in place, if we look through a human-centered design lens and we look at our improvement opportunities as part of journeys, then that naturally helps us break down silos, because we start to see the connections between departments and functions. And if you bring the right people around the table, and you include the voice of the patients and the workforce, you come up with solutions that are designed for optimal experiences. It’s what happens in other industries, and we’ve just been a little behind getting there.
Kevin Pho: No, I agree with that when it comes to silos, because from a physician standpoint, that’s the way we’ve been trained, in silos. It’s very uncommon that we talk to other departments, other health care disciplines, even other specialties. So breaking down those silos and realizing that the patient has that common holistic experience, I think, is important. What would be an example of that? What would that look like in a successful case study?
Jennifer Baron: So I think if you’re thinking, for example, about, and I’ll just pick an easy one, something that I have focused on in my career, the arrival experience, and particularly maybe an arrival experience at a hospital, which can be quite intimidating. If you really look at the arrival experience as a journey, from the time someone pulls onto campus, or onto the organization’s property, to parking, walking into the facility, how do you check in, and then how do you get to where you need to go, there are often many people involved in that. Multiple teams: parking and transportation services, groundskeeping, operations, whether there’s a guest relations team or not, those folks being involved. And instead of looking at each of those functions in their own individual silos, you put the patient in the middle of that and say, “How do we create a better arrival experience for everyone who comes here?” You bring all of those people around the table, and you start to look at that entire journey, and you see things that maybe you didn’t see before, and you see a lot of those transition spaces.
This also works for employees, for our workforce, because every single person who’s coming into our facilities every day is also having an arrival experience as they get to work. So what does that look like? How far do they have to walk from where they’ve parked to get to where they need to go? And guess what we have found, or I have found in my experience: Paying attention even to that one thing creates a better experience as patients and providers come together throughout the course of the day, because it alleviates some of the stress that may occur if that arrival experience isn’t great. So that’s one example.
Kevin Pho: I talk to a lot of guests on the show about the employee experience, about the experience that various sectors of the health care workforce are going through. And sometimes, of course, if they have a poor experience, that’s going to affect the patient experience as well. After COVID, there has been a shortage, of course, of health care workers. There’s been an increase in burnout of physicians and nurses. So in that context, how can we maintain the patient experience when sometimes the employee experience is really suffering from a burnout standpoint?
Jennifer Baron: Yeah. So I was actually working in a health system during COVID, and so I had that lived experience, going in every day and seeing what was happening. COVID weirdly catalyzed a right-sizing of the focus on our care teams. So it wasn’t over-indexing into patient experience; it was a recognition that we have to equally care for our workforce as well. And so I think that is still a challenge, and as you said, we’ve had a loss of our workforce post-COVID that we’re still trying to recover from.
But as we lean into our workforce again, we have to understand the daily experiences that people are having. That’s why it’s really, truly a leadership capability at this point in time, because leaders have to be able to understand how to have those conversations with folks on their team, how to understand their points of view, where people are coming from, if they are feeling burnout, if they’re starting to have signals of burnout, understand what’s contributing to that, and then, again, prioritize really resolving those challenges, so that we can bring joy and meaning back to our workforce. A lot of data has shown that that then translates to great experiences for the people that we care for.
Kevin Pho: So I’m hearing that, of course, health care leadership really needs to take that prominent role in improving both the employee and patient experience. What would that look like in a practical case?
Jennifer Baron: Yeah. So I think a lot of it starts with listening, and sort of leaning into curiosity and listening. We have gotten so busy, we have so many competing priorities, and the problems that we are working to solve in health care are very complex, and leaders often get sort of buried in all of that, right? There’s so much to do. So at the organization level, it’s really intentionally thinking about upskilling listening, and how we capture ideas from our care teams that are on the front lines, that are actively caring for our patients and, through the course of their day, delivering something to the front line. We don’t do enough to listen and capture great ideas from those employees.
So a good case study that I have seen is programs that allow health care providers and the workforce to elevate ideas to solve everyday problems that they’re seeing, and to actually create a system where that feedback, those ideas, get to the right level of leadership, are evaluated, can be funded, and then implemented. I think all of us as employees spend so much time at work, and when we see problems and we feel disempowered and not able to see the right channel to help elevate ideas or solve the problems, it’s extremely frustrating, and again, it can lead to feelings of overwhelm or burnout. So even just starting there, with reevaluating how we’re listening to our workforce and cultivating ideas and implementing those ideas, I think can go a long way.
Kevin Pho: So I think that’s going to lead into our third theme, and I want to ask more about listening. Our third theme will be actionable steps and reimagining health care practices. Before getting into the third theme, I want to remind our listeners that we are listening to a special sponsored episode from NRC Health, discussing strategies for patient-centered and employee-focused care. Find out more at NRCHealth.com. That’s NRCHealth.com, and the link will be in the show notes.
So Jennifer, I want to follow up on what you said about upskilling listening and how important that is. What exactly would that look like, say, from a clinician standpoint? How can we better listen to patients? Would it be focus groups? Would it be surveys? What I do in the exam room? What are some ways that it would look like from my standpoint as a physician?
Jennifer Baron: Yeah, I think it’s all of that. So let’s again go back to the organization level. At the organization level, there are lots of different ways to listen, and many organizations sort of have the annual engagement survey, where feedback is collected. What we’ve seen in our data is that that is often not enough. I think only 65 percent of employees say that they don’t believe their feedback actually matters, right? So that’s a pretty high number, if you’re giving feedback and you don’t think that it matters. So it’s really thinking through: How do we listen daily? How do we listen weekly? How do we listen monthly, quarterly, and annually? And there are different tools that can be used for all those listenings, going from rounding to that annual survey, and lots of things in between, and pulse surveys that could be done topically on a regular basis. So again, that’s at the organizational level: How do we listen, really harness ideas that can be implemented, and then take action on those?
At the frontline level and at the provider level, I think we have had such a long conversation around improving communication, and that we need to improve communication. First and foremost, I think, from a provider level, it’s embracing it as a skill. As a clinician, you’ve had to learn a lot of skills: scientific skills, skills for diagnosing, relationship skills. One of those relationship skills is effective listening, and so it’s looking for different opportunities to improve that. We provide video tutorials for folks. Lots of organizations have experience coaches that will actually shadow a provider and give tips in real time on how to improve communication.
And not being afraid of patient feedback, and I think that is a human challenge for a lot of providers. I would love to hear your thoughts on that. I have talked to other providers, and it can be hard to receive feedback sometimes that maybe is hard to digest. But if we can approach that feedback through the lens of learning, and as an opportunity to build a new skill, or to uplevel a skill that we’ve already been working on, we can start to consume that feedback in a more positive way and not take it so personally, but really, again, take it as, “I just need to continue to improve on this skill.”
Kevin Pho: So as you could imagine, there is a spectrum in terms of how that clinician feedback is presented, right? I’ve heard of health systems publicly posting that feedback almost like a wall of shame, where they will be kind of on a competitive level, competing with other clinicians. Certainly, I get feedback from these surveys confidentially through email. So there’s a wide spectrum. Just from your experience, what are some of the more constructive ways that feedback can be presented to the medical staff?
Jennifer Baron: Yeah. So the wall of shame, I believe, at one time was real. There has been a lot of work done to move away from that and create a more positive conversation, obviously. One of the things that I have seen be pretty effective was actually a program that we launched when I was at my prior health system. We created a recognition program for providers that had high scores in patient feedback around the communication domain. And so it was very fun, very positive. It was a quarterly recognition. We would have an event around it, celebrate those providers, publish their names so everyone could see who kind of won the awards. And we started to see more and more providers upskill, and each quarter the number of physicians recognized actually improved and grew, quarter over quarter. It was pretty consistent.
What was also effective about that program was that for physicians that perhaps were working to build that skill, they knew who their peers were who received great patient feedback. So you would know who you could ask, “Hey, what do you do in this? I’m struggling with this. What’s your skill? How do you approach that listening?” Or maybe even finding a provider to talk to about a specific patient that’s been challenging from a communication standpoint, to get their feedback on how they might approach something differently. So it created more of a community conversation around that communication domain and how to upskill our communication with patients, and it allowed us to leverage people who may be more naturally skilled in that space to be able to mentor others.
Kevin Pho: Now, looking through all that data of patient feedback, what would you say are some common themes that are present in that patient feedback, and what are some of the highest-yielding things that clinicians can do to improve some of that feedback, based on the survey data that you have?
Jennifer Baron: Yeah. So I think, again, we sort of talked earlier about what we have seen in the qualitative analysis that we did on our comments. We know the communication theme has been a priority theme for a long time, and it’s not just, by the way, on our physician surveys. It’s across all of our domains, all roles. Communication is a primary value of patients in health care. And so we’ve talked a lot about how to improve communication already. I don’t know that I have anything specific to add to that, but that actually would go a very long way to improve overall experiences for patients, if we just really did a deep dive on learning communication as a skill.
Kevin Pho: I talk to some patients and say, “You may get a survey, and if you have any constructive feedback, feel free to fill out that survey and let us know what you think.” Some patients come back and say that they’re getting survey fatigue, because they’re just getting asked by pretty much every facet of the health care system to fill out a survey. Is that a phenomenon? Is that a real thing, survey fatigue among patients?
Jennifer Baron: So it can be, and a lot of health systems have put survey rules into place to ensure that a patient isn’t oversurveyed. So it could be that a patient will only receive one survey in a month, and it would maybe be for their first visit, which would be primary care, perhaps. Or if there’s a primary care and a specialist visit, maybe they would receive them for both of those, but not for the lab and not for radiology. I think the challenge is that health care organizations are so hungry for actionable insights, and we want to get the insights in every little area, that sometimes we can burden our patients with that, or it feels like a burden. So that is an art. We have to be careful with that.
One of the feedback tools that we just rolled out as part of our AI-enabled platform is a point-of-service opportunity for people to provide feedback. So it’s not necessarily sent to them; it’s QR code-based. So if a patient wants to provide feedback about a particular experience that they’re having, maybe it’s in a waiting room, or it’s in a cafeteria, or even the restrooms, then they can scan that QR code and provide it on a more on-demand level.
Holistically, when I talk about learning to listen more broadly, we can see a decline in response rates from each generation. Going back to that generational conversation, we see that our Silent Generation and boomers have about a 36 percent response rate to our historic surveys that we send out. Gen X drops to around 24 percent, millennials drop to 12 percent, and Gen Z drops to a 9 percent response rate, right? So we have to start looking at other ways to collect feedback and understand how people are feeling about the experiences that they’re having, and that’s something that we’re dedicated to really bringing to the clients that we work with.
Kevin Pho: One of the things that you mentioned earlier in our conversation was that health care is behind other service industries when it comes to collecting and implementing improvements in terms of the patient experience. So with that in mind, what can health care learn from other sectors, like hospitality, retail, and at-home care, to improve patient and employee experiences?
Jennifer Baron: So I think when we think of other industries, hospitality is a great one, and retail’s great as well. The core capability that they have is really that focus on their customer. And so I think health care has taken longer to recognize or accept that health care is a service industry. It is, I would argue, and I’ve been in it, again, for decades, the most important service industry. It is the most human-centric industry. But we are providing expertise and a service that people are seeking, and that’s kind of what a customer is, right? You seek goods or services, you search to find them, and you then have an experience with that good or service. And so if you kind of broaden out and look at it from that cycle, we go through the same cycle in health care.
Other industries, again, have been investing in learning about the experiences they’re providing. They’ve been investing in figuring out, “How do we mature the way we manage these experiences intentionally across our customer journey?” And again, that’s sort of a new way of thinking in health care; we just started to think that way over the last several years. So I think that’s the big learning: really understanding how those industries put their customers at the core, what tools they use, how they build cultures around it, how they create centricity around the experiences of their workforce and their customers, and then how they use human-centered design to bring it all together.
Kevin Pho: A reminder to my listeners that you’re listening to a special sponsored episode from NRC Health, discussing strategies for patient-centered and employee-focused care. Find out more at NRCHealth.com. That’s NRCHealth.com, and that link will be in the show notes. Jennifer, let’s end with some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.
Jennifer Baron: Sure. I think number one is this whole environment of experience, which, again, we know is standing in health care. I think we have to lean in with curiosity and through a lens of learning, so I think that can really shift our mindsets as we move forward. And again, really thinking about health care experiences as an entire connected journey, and not a siloed transaction, is going to be really important as we move forward. And leveling up listening, really, that is phase one. If we do one thing, it would be to level up the way we listen, to receive actionable insights, so we can make improvements that are meaningful. That’s the big takeaway.
Kevin Pho: Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks again for coming on the show.
Jennifer Baron: Thank you.
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