“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” — Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management thinkers.
With the Integrated Healthcare Association (CA based industry association) policy decision to remove patient experience measurement from its incentive payment program, I was reminded of this quote, which I’ve frequently used in keynotes and panels worldwide on Healthcare Transformation and the move towards a more tech-enabled value based care system, while at Harvard Business School. It’s been one of the most fulfilling chapters of my life. Working with governments, health systems, & companies for change at the system level.
A key component of this strategy is the focus on measurement. For both #outcomes & costs for each patient (Strategy #2). Measurement is core to understanding and making decisions on #Quality. In other words:
“How well did the patient actually do? Relative to how much it cost to deliver those outcomes.”
The customer experience is a key outcome measure that every other player in our global economy takes into account when evaluating & assessing quality and delivery of products and services. So why should Healthcare be any different? I’d argue, rather, it should be the sector that values the customer experience aka the patient the most! Your Health is Wealth!
We in healthcare should be obsessed with the patient experience. To not to just improve it, but evolve it to make care more convenient, meaningful, actionable, and frankly exciting. We should act like Amazon, with its obsession and focus on customers, an almost cult-like relentless focus on how to meet the customer needs better, faster, cheaper. You cannot watch a single Jeff Bezos interview over the past 20 years without him talking about customers. And through supply chain optimization, data driven solutions, and rigorous measurement, Amazon has cut its delivery time in urban areas from 2 days down to even just a few hours in the US. Customers are delighted. It’s an indicator of the quality of Amazon’s service. It’s why their Net Promoter Score (NPS) is so high.
US Healthcare spends $4.5 trillion or ~$14,000 per person, closing in on 20% of GDP. We need to ignite a national conversation around the importance of the patient experience as a required national quality measurement standards. Because as Lord Kelvin said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Peter Drucker’s “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Outcomes are the true measure of quality. And within those outcome measures, the patient experience.
The goal of a health care system should be to serve patients. To improve and optimize a person’s health. To deliver value. Its True North. That’s the goal. If today, you improve outcomes and the patient experience without escalating your costs, you’ve succeeded. If today, you deliver great outcomes & a great patient experience more efficiently (lowering costs), you’ve succeeded. If you have not done one of those two things, you’ve failed.
