To provide your clients or patients with the best experience possible, it’s important to understand their ‘customer journey’ with your practice – or their ‘patient journey’ to be more healthcare-specific.
What is the patient journey and what are the touchpoints?
The patient journey describes the sequential steps and interactions that a patient goes through when engaging with your business.
A touchpoint represents every point at which a person has contact with your brand, including everything from seeing a social media post or hearing about your practice through a friend to physically attending an appointment at your practice.
As the patient journey is comprised of so many touchpoints, we recommend that you take the time to analyse each touchpoint and identify areas where improvement could be made. By taking on the perspective of your patients when they engage with your practice, you’ll be able to pick up on things that would previously go unnoticed and implement the strategies to address them – thus creating a better practice for everyone involved.
As the full journey spans many points, we’ve split this topic into two parts – the patient journey prior to appointment and the patient journey during and post appointment. We identify the touchpoints that you should be aware of and delve into some strategies that you can implement in your practice to optimise the overall patient journey.
You can read part one of the blog here!
Where does the in-practice patient journey begin and end?
It starts from when the patient approaches your practice and goes right through to the conclusion of their treatment or experience – including everything from simply exiting your building and carpark, to receiving their test results, or being invoiced for their appointment and treatments. Each of these touchpoints impacts their overall patient journey, so to optimise their experience with you and your practice, it’s important to ensure that you perform well at each and every step.
Strategies to improve the patient journey:
Think through the touchpoints that patients experience at your practice – you may even want to go through the full patient journey yourself, or have a team member do it, to gain a thorough understanding of what your practice offers. Then, based on this analysis there are a number of simple changes you might consider making to improve your patients’ journey.
1. Ensure it is easy to locate and access your practice
Is your practice easily accessible via public transport? Do you have enough parking available for patients and team members? Do you display appropriate signage to make finding your practice simple and easy? Ensuring that it’s easy for patients to locate and access your practice will create a less stressful patient journey, and will reduce the likelihood of patients turning up late for their appointments – creating a more efficient practice.
A few strategies to consider include:
Updating signage to make your practice stand out more.
Including public transport information on your website on how to get to your practice – such as the best train station to get off at.
Provide information on your website about parking – whether there is street parking, a specific parking area or paid parking options.
Provide any necessary accessibility information on your website or over the phone, where appropriate – particularly for people with walking aids or wheelchairs.
2 . Create an inviting practice atmosphere
We’re so used to working in our own practices and being comfortable in the environment, that it’s easy to forget that visiting a healthcare professional can be a nerve-wracking or stressful experience for some people. This can be eased somewhat by providing your patients with an inviting and calm space. Strategies include ensuring your waiting room is clean and tidy, and filled with comfortable furniture, warm lighting and some form of white noise – soft background music or interesting programs playing on a TV.
3. Ensure team members are welcoming and friendly
Having friendly and pleasant engagements with team members has a huge impact on the patient experience. From being greeted with a welcoming smile and a “hello” by administration staff as they walk through the door, to helpful and kind interactions with clinicians. Ensure that your team members maintain a tone that reflects the values of your practice and puts your patients at ease. A culture and values team development session can help with this, including getting your team members to review and discuss how they exhibit and live the practice values in their everyday roles.
4. Where possible, utilise strategies to keep wait times to a minimum
Of course, the nature of providing great patient care can lead to unavoidable waiting times some days, but there’s a difference between these happening sometimes and every day. When your patients are regularly experiencing long wait times it can really impact their overall experience with your practice. It’s worth getting feedback and suggestions from your administration team as to how these could be reduced. Maybe more held/catch-up times? Perhaps a clock on the wall in the consult room? Setting up more templates and macros in your clinical software to maximise efficiency during the consultation? On days where the waiting time is really building up, it’s important to have strategies in place to keep your patients in the loop and not on the edges of their seats waiting for their names to be called.
5. Ensure your patients understand the information they’re receiving
The combination of feeling a bit anxious and the information they’re receiving being new to them, can lead to patients not letting you know if they don’t understand something. The results of this vary from patient to patient, but might include them feeling confused (and therefore dissatisfied) when they leave, calling the practice multiple times to get more information, and perhaps them not following up when they should and taking the wrong next steps, amounts of medication etc. Where possible, it can help if you and your team can:
Use accessible language - avoiding complex medical terminology as much as possible.
Encourage patients to bring a support person, and to make notes during the appointment if needed.
Utilise interpreters where appropriate.
Provide patients with brief point-form notes of their next steps – 1…, 2… etc, as well as what the next steps are for you and your team; when they’ll get their results, whether your reception team will book their review appointment when they leave, etc.
Encourage your patients to ask questions and to tell you what they’ve understood from the information you’ve provided to them.
Provide information sheets they can refer to later.
Have another team member, such as your practice nurse, go through information and questions with your patients in further detail.
6. Send test results promptly
It’s no surprise that people hate the process of waiting for their test results to come through – especially when they’re concerning a serious health issue. There are strategies you can implement to ensure your patients don’t feel like they’ve been left in limbo. Encourage your team members to communicate how the patient will receive their results. Will they receive an email? A text message? A phone call? Letting your patients know what form their results will come in ensures they’ll be prepared and avoid missing a message and being left wondering “whatever happened with that test”.
Where it is difficult to know when results will be available, a clinician could simply state, “We hope to have your results back to you by X date, however, if we’re not in contact with you by Y date, feel free to contact our administration team for an update”. This sets reasonable expectations and prevents your patients from sitting at home on edge waiting for the phone to ring.
7. Follow up
Following up with your patients, post-appointment is a great way to keep your practice front of mind. While the specific process you follow to do this depends on your practice and the services you provide, a few strategies include:
Following up with accounts promptly.
Sending reminders when patients are due to book their next appointment.
Touching base to check their progress with a specific treatment.
Encouraging them to sign up to a newsletter or to follow your practice’s social media accounts.
No matter how you do it, maintaining contact keeps your practice at the top of the contact list for the next time the patient requires the services you offer.
With retaining your clientele being so key to practice success, putting in the groundwork to develop the processes and practices that bring about a positive patient journey is an investment in the longevity of your practice. When your patients are pleased with the services provided, they’re more likely to return in the future, but they’re also more likely to refer other people to visit your practice or leave ratings online. So, optimising the patient-journey is not something to leave at the bottom of the to-do list, but rather something for your and your team to consider each day in your practice.
Sometimes, it pays to walk in your patients’ shoes for a day – figuratively speaking!
The Augmentum team provides a broad range of consultancy and management services, supporting healthcare business owners and decision makers in the key areas of their business. If you would like assistance in optimising the patient experience offered at your practice, get in touch to find out more, or check out our website www.augmentum.com.au
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