CX and the Growing Importance of Empathy in Healthcare
Compassion comes from a heartfelt empathy for a Patient's current condition
It has been stated that there are three levels of caring: (1) Competence; (2) Courtesy; and (3) Compassion. Competence is typically the basis on which clinical staff are hired and fired. Courtesy is something, that if you don't hire for it, staff can be educated and trained to practice it more effectively. Compassion, however, represents a much higher emotional level of caring. It comes from a heartfelt empathy for the patient's anxiety, fears, current health condition, and/or physical and emotional pain.
Empathy is the ability to share in another's emotions or feelings. It is the ability to imagine what someone is going through and to share directly in that experience with them. Therefore, empathy is an important element in patient experience.
Non-clinical outcomes just as important as clinical outcomes as part of overall Patient Experience
While clinical outcomes our obviously extremely important in a healthcare context overall patient experience is the result of both clinical and non-clinical outcomes.
In a study done by Press Ganey Associates evaluating the Top 10 drivers of patient satisfaction, 9 out of 10 top drivers for patient satisfaction had little if anything to do with clinical outcomes. Patient's surveyed prioritized such things such as how well the staff worked together to care for me; overall cheerfulness of the hospital; response to concerns/complaints during their stay; staff sensitivity to the inconvenience of hospitalization; and how well nurses kept patients informed.
More and more studies are showing that patients reserve their positive word of mouth and loyalty to healthcare providers whom anticipate their needs and where they are met by friendly, courteous, and compassionate staff.
Importance of empathy is being recognized across the healthcare industry
Recognizing this importance, one institution, The Center for Research in Medical Education & Health Care at Thomas Jefferson University, has developed what it calls the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy.
The study they performed included physicians across different specializations and consisted of twenty key questions designed to help determine an empathy score for a given healthcare practitioner. A sampling of these questions are as follows:
I try to imagine myself in my patient's shoes when providing care to them;
I try to to understand what is going on in my patients' minds by paying close attention to their nonverbal cues and body language;
Patients' illness can only be cured by medical treatment; therefore, affection ties to my patients cannot have a significant place in this endeavor;
Because people are different, it is almost impossible for me to see things from my patients' perspective; and
I consider understanding my patients' body language as important as verbal communication in caregiver - patient relationships.
As you can see, the survey includes a combination of questions that represent opposing perspectives on the importance of empathy in a healthcare setting.
Findings to date have found that female students and physicians scored higher in empathy than their male counterparts. Differences have also been found between healthcare practitioners who are considered to be in more "people oriented" specialties vs. "technology-oriented" specialties. Physician specialties participating in the study included psychiatrist, anesthesiologists, orthopedists, neurosurgeons, and radiologists among other healthcare disciplines.
There is a growing sentiment that consideration of empathy become part of the criteria for determining which applicants should be considered at certain medical schools given increasing evidence that empathy plays a positive role in clinical outcomes. Unfortunately, the study also found that there was a significant decline in mean empathy scores during ones 3rd year of medical school (meaning patient empathy was observed to decline).
Proven Tools for understanding Customer's Wants and Needs
In the CX Design and Design Thinking disciplines, Empathy is a core mindset to hold when designing new and improved customer experiences.
Some of the most widely used tools in each of these disciplines for helping organizations empathize with their customers are the following:
Exploratory Research - conducted within the setting or context of the service experience (as much as possible), for the purpose of gaining new insights, discovering new ideas, and increasing knowledge of phenomena.
Empathy Maps - used to gain deeper insight into the customer's environment and what a given persona (customer segment) is seeing, hearing, thinking & feeling, saying & doing; and
Customer Journey Maps - used to gain an improved understanding of how expectations, wants and needs, are met or unmet across the different stages of the customer journey.
Healthcare organizations need to think about Designing for better Patient Experience
Healthcare is an experience, not simply a service. Good experiences simply don't happen (without some level of design). Bad experiences can be avoided. Good experiences, at least the ones that are memorable, are well thought out. They are designed, meaning that customer expectations, wants and needs have been understood and that the critical interactions (or touch points) involved in meeting these wants and needs have been evaluated with key touch points being modified or improved to meet these expectations in a consistent fashion.
Therefore, healthcare delivery organizations that hope to design more empathetic patient experiences would be wise to leverage these proven methods and techniques towards their goal of improving overall patient experience.