Originally published by Don Peppers on LinkedIn: Fine Dining at the Local Hospital
Earlier this week I visited my nephew and his newborn baby (see above), delivered a few days ago at Coastal Carolina Hospital, in Hardeeville, South Carolina. My nephew and his wife spoke glowingly of the service they had received at the hospital, and it just goes to show that there really is hope when it comes to delivering a better patient experience.
That’s great, because most hospital patient experiences are (may I speak frankly here?) simply awful. Many patients go to the hospital in the first place because they are ill, of course, but even elective surgery and other non-illness hospital stays (such as childbirth) can often be terribly unpleasant. At most hospitals the patients just aren’t treated like customers at all, but more like – um – patients.
IDEO, the design and innovation firm, even addressed this issue once with a hospital client of theirs by contrasting a hospital stay with a fine restaurant meal. To teach the client’s executives about how lousy a hospital experience really was for the patient, they put the staff through an exercise designed to build empathy for patients using a fine restaurant as an analogy. How would a fine restaurant be operated, if it were run the same way a modern hospital is run?
First, of course, there would be no boundary between the “backstage” and “public access” part of the restaurant. Diners would have to eat while surrounded by cooks, pots and pans, and dishwashers. In addition, according to IDEO’s write-up of the exercise,
“Actors played the parts of waiters, who treated our guests in an incomprehensibly brisk manner. Diners were required to wear unflattering bibs. Unexplained dishes came and went. There was a lot of waiting with no explanation.”
In hospital care today, I think the real cutting edge of innovation lies not just in the technology of medicine itself, but in the techniques of delivering service to patients, as well.
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Mayo Clinic sends its medical staff to hospitality companies to receive training in customer service.
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Cleveland Clinic requires its 43,000 staff members to attend half-day workshops on empathy.
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Griffin Hospital opened up all its medical records to the patients involved, cutting the rate of malpractice claims by more than 40%.
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And at UCLA Health System, managers have built an entire hospital culture around constantly improving patients’ satisfaction with their experience.
As for my nephew, one of the most notable elements of their hospital experience, he said, was the dinner that Coastal Carolina Hospital put on for him and his wife, the day following the delivery, before they headed home with the baby. It was a “white tablecloth” dinner, he said, served in his wife’s hospital room with the lights dimmed and some very nice food, professionally prepared. Definitely not the standard hospital fare. Just a romantic dinner for two, right there in the hospital, celebrating the beginning of a new family.