35. Ask the patients!

Patient satisfaction is all the rave in health care.

Ahem, finally.

PSFK brings news of Best Buy’s effort to incorporate customer wants into its products:

The giant electronics retailer has been working on a program that actively incorporates customer feedback into the design process of future products. The “Blue Label” line features notebook computers from Toshiba and HP that come with ideas sourced from Best Buy client input.

…

It’s great to see a large cooperation like Best Buy being flexible, responsive and actually paying attention to the real needs of people.

It certainly is great.  The real needs of people. Hospitals should be doing the same thing.  Start a Patient Experience Force today.  Not a task force, a force: a group of patients (past and present) tasked with making your hospital’s experience the best it can be.

From I4U News:

“As the leading consumer electronics retailer, Best Buy has millions of interactions with consumers each year. We listened to our customers and learned that they wanted more from the feature set on available laptops so we went directly to manufacturers to fix that,” said Wendy Fritz, senior vice president of computing, Best Buy.

Why can’t hospitals replicate such a program for its services?  They can, and should.

Ask the Force everything.  Experiences with parking, navigating your facilities, interactions with physicians and employees, services offered, billing…etc.

Oh, and then exploit their opinions to make your health care facility better.  It’s that simple.

Principle #35: We will involve patients in all of our patient experience decision making (which, by the way, is almost all of them).