The Patient Experience

Creating a patient experience in your practice can be easy. The content on this page gives you ideas about how to create and improve the patient experience in your practice.

What is the Patient Experience?

This question might seem basic. It is. And still, I am amazed at how many times it is obvious to me that a physician's practice is focused on what is best for them instead of the patient.

For example, when the content on the homepage of your website is all about you, why you’re the best, and your “policies and procedures,” you’ve lost. Patients come to your website for their reasons, not yours.

How Important is Clear Messaging in the Patient Experience?

If it’s not clear on the homepage of your website whom you seek to serve and what you offer, you’ve lost. Again.

In mid-2020, I did an analysis of more than 250 ophthalmology websites for 8 criteria of user experience. The results were surprising, and soon I’ll be publishing a white paper on what I learned. (Fill out the form at the bottom of this page to get my latest ideas for helping prospects and patients feel special and get notified when the new PDF is released.)

The trends from my research were so impactful to me, that I became a StoryBrand Certified Guide to help practices create clear messaging throughout their patient experience and journey. I wrote about becoming a StoryBrand Guide here. And if you’d like to read “StoryBrand” by Donald Miller to learn more, you may get it on Amazon here. (Affiliate Link)

How Might You Become a Patient Experience Focused Practice?

This is a beautiful question! What I mean is, saying you are patient experience focused is easy. Doing it, on the other hand, is trickier.

The good news is, if you’re asking yourself this question, you’re on your way.

Here Are Three Steps to Becoming a Patient Experience Focused Practice

Step One

Read the book “The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business is a Stage” by Pine and Gilmore. (Affiliate Link) Preparing for the next step, buy a few copies.

Step Two in Becoming Patient Experience Focused

Create a Team of People in Your Practice - A Patient Experience Task Force! Doing this will change everything because you get buy-in from your team. And don’t assign people, ask for volunteers.

Give the team autonomy and authority. This way, they will feel empowered to have an impact on what is about to happen next.

Step Three

Audit. Everything.

This is the most important step to begin your transformation. The team must critically evaluate everything in the practice relating to the patient experience in their journey while getting care from your practice.

When your team puts all of this together, feels empowered to enact change, you’re on your way to a successful transformation to a patient experience focused practice. You don’t have to do it all at once, and this step helps your team develop a roadmap for how you might accomplish your objective.

In Conclusion

Writing about the patient experience, and experiences, in general, is one of my passions. My hope is that it becomes one of yours, too. And if you believe you don’t need to think abbot the patient experience in your practice because it’s someone else’s job, why not give it a try?

There are lots of facets to the exploration of the patient experience n your practice. I’ll continue to create content on this page to help you with understanding the patient experience in your practice. So that means you will want to stop back often to see what’s new!

If you’d like a free pdf that I put together about how to make your customers and prospects feel special, fill out the form below. Or, if you’d like to schedule a time to discuss something you’re working on, email me at Joel@makemarketingeasy.com.

Good luck designing and creating the patient experience in your practice!