Patient Experience in Healthcare: The Simple Improvements That Make a Big Impact

Patient experience can make or break a practice. After all, reviews are easy to find for patients and it’s only natural that if given an option, patients will choose to visit a practice that’s known for offering a great experience.

How to make sure your practice makes the cut?

In this article, we will use the front desk as an example, but as you will see, the general idea extends to other areas as well. 

We’ll also discuss how AI in healthcare, particularly conversational AI, is transforming the front desk experience, and how to make sure practices serving diverse populations aren’t lacking in the patient experience department.

Patient Experience vs Patient Satisfaction

First, it’s important to make the distinction between patient experience and patient satisfaction. They are sometimes used interchangeably, but they shouldn’t be.

What is patient experience?

Patient experience starts with the first interaction the patient has with your practice—like calling the front desk to book an appointment—and covers every single interaction that follows.

Was the provider helpful and encouraging? Was the appointment delayed because the previous ones were running long? Was there free parking outside?

With patient experience, everything matters.

Naturally, maintaining positive patient experience has a huge impact on the reputation and revenue of your practice. Patients who were treated well are more likely to come back, leave a positive review, and recommend you to others.

But patient experience can even have an impact on clinical outcomes. When a patient feels heard and understands the providers’ instructions, they’re more likely to follow them. Similarly, positive encouragement can mean patients will do more to look after their health.

What is patient satisfaction?

Patient satisfaction has more to do with the expectations patients have—often before they even contact your practice—and their emotional response to the interaction. It tells us whether the patient is pleased after interacting with the practice, be it because their expectations were met or exceeded.

It’s also entirely subjective. For instance, let’s say their appointment has objectively gone badly: the provider was rude, late, and didn’t explain things well. But at the same time, the provider delivered some very good news that the patient was waiting for, like telling them they have a clear bill of health. The patient may still be satisfied with the visit, because the positive news they got outweighed the (admittedly negative) experience of interacting with the provider.

Ideally, good patient experience and high patient satisfaction will go hand-in-hand.

Examples of Patient Experience

If everything contributes to the patient experience, what are some tangible examples of it?

Let’s focus on the first point of contact for patients: your front desk.

The impact of the front desk on patient experience

How front desk staff interact with the patients can set the tone for the entire visit. Some of the major factors in shaping the patient experience are:

• How long are the wait times? Whether patients are waiting on the phone or in the office, long wait times are to be avoided. It’s especially important given recent research by The Harris Poll, commissioned by the American Academy of Physician Associates. One of the findings is that US adults spend 8 hours a month coordinating care either for themselves, or family members. Making your front desk more efficient would shave off at least some of that time. 
• How easily can patients schedule appointments? Manual systems can lead to errors, double bookings, or confusion. When patients are able to easily schedule, confirm, or reschedule appointments, they feel more in control of their care. That’s especially important for new patients, who are deciding whether to choose your practice or a different one.
• Is your team empathetic? When patients interact with your practice, it’s often for a sensitive or worrying reason. Making sure your team doesn’t forget about it and acts in an empathetic, polite, and helpful way is crucial for a positive patient experience.

Seeing how your patients rate their experience in these three areas will give you some idea of what needs to be improved when it comes to the front desk.

How to Improve Patient Experience in Healthcare

Patient experience is not something you can work on once and then leave it alone; it should be continually perfected. If you decide to improve it at your practice, consider the following three methods.

Training

Your team’s ability to communicate effectively, empathize with patients, and manage difficult situations can directly impact how patients perceive their care. Here’s how you can go about training your team:

1. Hold regular training sessions focused on empathy, communication, conflict resolution, and patient-centric service, to ensure that each patient feels well taken care of from the moment they walk in.
2. Include technical training on how to use your management software and other tools. 
3. Make sure there’s a plan in place for how new hires get trained to familiarize them with how your practice does things. 
4. At the same time, make sure there’s a cadence of training for the existing team—even the people you’ve been working with for a long time can benefit from additional training. 
5. Consider providing your team with courses you could send them on, inviting an expert for an internal training, or sharing materials on relevant subjects.

Feedback

Another key method for enhancing patient experience is actively gathering and acting on patient feedback.

Implementing regular patient surveys or conducting follow-up calls can tell you a lot about their experiences, thus helping you identify areas of improvement. 

Whether you decide to conduct formal surveys or have casual conversations, listening to patient concerns and suggestions shows that your practice cares about their opinions and is willing to make changes when necessary.

Technology

Tools and technology play a pivotal role in enhancing patient experience. Here are some examples you could consider introducing into your processes:

1. Docpace. An AI schedule optimization solution for practices integrated with athenahealth. 
2. Rater8. A platform that allows you to track, grow, and optimize the online reputation of your practice.
3. Talkie.ai. AI voice agents that support your front desk (and your patients) in everyday tasks, like managing appointments, refilling prescriptions, or routing calls. Book a demo with our team to find out more.
4. Cedar. A patient financial platform that helps patients and practices navigate the complicated world of medical billing.

Incorporating the right technology can ensure that patients have a smoother, more convenient experience.

By focusing on these three areas—training your staff, actively gathering feedback from patients, and leveraging the right tools—your practice can significantly improve patient experience, ultimately leading to higher satisfaction and better health outcomes.

The Role of AI in Enhancing Patient Experience

There are certain areas that won’t be improved by training or feedback. Specifically, if your team simply has too much work, things will start falling by the wayside.

You could deal with this by hiring more staff—but that’s not always realistic, and it won’t even necessarily fix everything. For instance, hiring another person for your front desk team won’t help with call peaks, when seemingly everyone within a 100-mile radius is trying to reach your practice at 9 AM on a Monday. The new person wouldn’t be able to pick up all of these calls anyway, and won’t have anything to do an hour later, when the phones calm down.

If your practice’s needs aren’t stable, hiring is risky. Introducing AI agents into your processes is a great alternative.

AI agents can answer phones, schedule appointments, manage prescription refills, respond to common questions, coordinate waitlists, and much more—all while handling multiple conversations at once.

It means your patients:

1. Won’t have to deal with long wait times when they call your practice.
2. Will be able to book an appointment and resolve their cases 24/7, whenever it’s convenient for them—regardless of your opening hours.
3. Will be able to book their first visit at your practice without delay, as the AI agent can collect all the necessary information to create their patient chart (with the bare minimum info at first that your team can fill in later.)
4. Will get reminders about upcoming appointments.
5. Will be able to leave messages for your providers in real time, e.g. about new symptoms they’re experiencing.

At the same time you:

1. Won’t have to hire more staff to achieve all of this.
2. Won’t have to pay a front desk team member to be on call after hours.
3. Will see a rise in your revenue thanks to booking new patients and filling up your providers’ calendars.
4. Will enable your staff to review the cases that were automatically resolved, and call back the patients only when additional steps are needed.
5. And, crucially, you will see the experience of your patients improving.

How to Improve Patient Experience for Multilingual and Diverse Populations

You shouldn’t pick and choose the patients who will have a better experience when interacting with your practice. Addressing the needs of multilingual populations is crucial as well, especially if your practice is located in a diverse area.

Sadly, language barriers can not only create frustration and misunderstanding—they can also lead to patients deciding against booking doctor visits altogether.

Consider offering multilingual support at every touchpoint. This includes providing multilingual staff, translated materials, and tools that can communicate in various languages. 

By using AI to automate phone call communication, practices can eliminate the stress of language barriers for non-English-speaking patients.

By embracing language diversity your practice can not only improve patient experience but also foster trust and loyalty among a broader patient base, ensuring that all individuals have access to high-quality care.

Key Takeaways

• Patient experience and patient satisfaction are not the same. Patient experience covers every single interaction a patient has with your practice, while patient satisfaction refers to their emotional response to the interaction.
• Interactions with your front desk are a crucial part of patient experience.
• Wait times, the difficulty of scheduling appointments, and the empathy of your team all have an impact on patient experience.
• Training your staff, gathering (and implementing) feedback, and using the right tools can help improve patient experience.
• AI automation can take over a big chunk of responsibilities from your front desk. That translates to reduced wait times, improved process of booking appointments, and overall easier access to your front desk—which results in improving patient experience.
• If your practice is located in a diverse area, you also need to consider improvements to the experience of patients who don’t speak English, e.g. by introducing tools that will help them communicate in their first language.