Health Care discovers customer service
Medicine takes a page from retail
Generations of doctors and hospitals prided themselves on the quality of care they gave, but often overlooked patient comforts, such as extended waiting room stays. Now many critics say that attitude won’t suffice, and doctors and their practices must learn to compete not only with the quality of their product, but by offering great service.
Fallon Clinic in Worcester plans to lead that trend by retooling its entire culture into a customer service oriented business model, where every employee — from greeters to medical assistants to doctors and pharmacists — will learn to better appreciate the buyer-seller aspect of the patient-doctor relationship.Earlier this year, Fallon Clinic created a director of customer service excellence position that reports directly to CEO Craig Sammitt. Filling the new slot: Linda Adkins, a former director of customer service for Filene’s chain of department stores.
Her mandate is to tweak the customer service of the entire Fallon Clinic to better meet patients’ needs and expectations. "Everyone intuitively understands that giving great service to a patient is the right thing to do, but this whole notion of customer service is new to the health care industry," she says.
Or as Sammitt put it before hiring her: "You are a horizontalist in a vertical world."
Adkins says her job is to foster an attitude in each worker that he or she owns the connection that they make with patients and that employees need to respect what that ownership entails. Whether greeting patients, taking their vital signs or performing surgery, the demeanor of each employee has a great effect on the success of Fallon Clinic. Adkins will also will oversee the customer satisfaction survey process at Fallon Clinic, reading patients’ evaluations of their doctors and their overall experience.
The biggest complaint patients have is accuracy in waiting times, Adkins says. "They are more than willing to wait for their doctor because they are happy with the care — but they just want to know truthfully how long the wait will take. They don’t want to be told 10 minutes if it’s really 20." One of her goals will be to try and improve that communication, as well as lower waiting times.
More programs on horizon
Most Bay State hospitals and many large doctors groups have customer service positions but it is rare to find one placed so conspicuously high in the corporate hierarchy, says Karen S. Nelson, vice president of clinical affairs for
the Massachusetts Hospital Association. Nursing departments or some other middle-management level typically handle customer service aspects.
The creation of Adkins’s positions sends a strong message throughout the organization that customer service is a very important priority, she says. And one should expect the medical industry to follow in those footsteps, drawing on lessons learned from hospitality and retail industries, where customer service can make or break a company.
Many believe customer service will someday affect reimbursement rates from Medicare and health insurance carriers.
Bay State regulations are also driving the trend: Department of Public Health rules require providers to keep track of complaints, usually for appeal purposes. Implicit in that regulation: Providers should find ways of fixing broken customer service procedures.
For UMass Memorial Health Care, that means including doctors in the definition of customers. Within the next year, the hospital plans to create a position that will help physicians keep up-to-the-minute track of patients whom they refer to the hospital, says Gregory A Volturo, vice chairman of emergency medicine.
"We want to make sure information is transmitted in timely fashion and we want to develop some standards around communicating with those referring physicians because they get the phone calls from patients," he says. By better aiding those doctors, the new position would by extension help patients.
Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston already has a vice president’s position similar to Fallon Clinic’s. Others may follow suit as the customer service trend continues, says Nelson.
Kenneth J. St. Onge can be reached at kstonge@wbjournal.com
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