“Health Care is Most Likely to Act on Customer Experience”? I Disagree and Here is Why…

A few weeks ago Linda Ireland posted a stat of the week about which industry is most likely to act on customer experience.

“Health care leads all other industries in the active use of customer experience as a factor in all daily decisions.  A whopping 42 percent of the organizations who use customer experience as the primary driver in daily decision making are in health care.”

I read this a few times to makes sure I was reading it right because it is in conflict with what I have come to believe.  I did not want to be quick to disregard this study, instead I challenged myself to consider if there could be the underlying explanation for these results.

First I will explain why I believe health care is lagging and struggling to make patient experience a primary driver in daily decision making.  From 2007 to 2010 I was leading operations for the Canadian division of a large specialty pharmaceutical services company (#26 on the Fortune 100 2009).  We provided patient support programs for specialty products which essentially means managing a complex supply chain of services to help patients get access to therapies.  Services such as patient education, reimbursement, delivery logistics, nursing, adherence, just to name a few.  My point in sharing this is that it is tough to compare retail customer experience to health care patient experience.  The complexity and sensitivity of the supply chain in health care is exponential.  So yes, it is possible that patient experience may be on the minds of some leaders making decisions in the health care industry, however, the outcome, the patience experience today is highly flawed.  In other words, if we surveyed the patients of the same 42% of the organizations in health care, this would not be reflected in their customer satisfaction.

There are a number of barriers at play which the health care industry needs to address before we will see patient experience grow up and transform into what it needs to be.  Here are just a few of them:

1.  Health care is substantially behind in information technologies and social media technologies.  Both play an important role in all other industries on numerous fronts with regards to connecting and understanding their customers.  They have also been key in making the customer experience easier and more accessible.

2.  Health care has a dysfunctional eco-system that is anything but patient centric.  There is little to no incentive for companies and the government to collaborate and deliver holistic patient experiences.  HBR published a remarkable spotlight in their April 2010 on Fixing Health Care.  “An estimated 50% of health care spending goes toward unnecessary bureaucracy, duplicate tests, and other waste.”

3.  Patient privacy and other regulatory challenges are also obstacles for the first two barriers.   The industry has been slow to develop innovative solutions around these challenges but companies like patientlikeme.com are finally starting to make headway.

My main concern with the 42% statistic is that it implies that health care is leading other industries in providing good experiences which I would challenge.  However, I would agree that many smart health care companies are recognizing the need to make patient experience a priority and patients are beginning to demand this as well.  I believe it is the industry with the biggest challenges and biggest opportunities to transform customer experience.

What are your thoughts on this?

Related posts:

1. Health Care Megatrends
2. Customer Experience Megatrends – Very Promising
3. ClienteerHub for Customer Experience Social Learning!
4. The #1 Hurdle for Customer Experience Initiatives
5. Why am I so Passionate About Customer Experience?