Patient’s Perception is the New Reality: The Intersection of Multiple Stakeholders and Their Experience and Perception of Your Organization, and Why It Matters

Abstract

Perception is reality. This cliché is often said, but rarely understood by most caregivers seeing patients, and yet has become one of the key drivers that separates the winners from losers in healthcare today. Patients’ perceptions are shaped by many factors including television, social media, advertising, word of mouth from family and friends, and, of course, their own personal experiences. And with the advent of government-mandated national patient satisfaction surveys like HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems), patients’ perceptions are being captured and linked to hospital financial reimbursement. So, what do your stakeholders think about your hospital? And does it really matter when their perceptions are the new reality? Even though hospitals in the United States have continued to modernize clinically over the past 200 years, they have not modernized culturally. Creating affinity and even loyalty to an organization is good business and directly relates to volume and financial performance. But in healthcare, it is an incredibly complicated soup of people, processes, outcomes, ratings and rankings, customer service, and the experience that people have across thousands of employees and interactions.