Roundtable · Patient experience

Why the Patient Experience Is the Clinical Outcome

Why is the patient experience as important as the clinical outcome itself?

Practice Mindshare Podcast, Episode 5 ·

Clinicians are trained to measure outcomes. Patients measure something else: how they felt walking in, how they were treated by the front desk, and how they felt going home. This roundtable asks whether those are really two different things.

Three co-founders, in audiology, plastic surgery and veterinary surgery, answer with unusual agreement. The experience is not the wrapping around the care. It is part of the care, and it decides who gets to treat more patients.

“Patients don't remember what we tell them about the technology. They remember how they felt in the moment they were here.”

Dr. Rose does not see two things at all. The patient experience and the clinical outcome are inseparable, she said. If the patient is having a positive experience, the clinical outcome is going to be positive too.

Patients do not remember what she tells them about the hearing aids or the technology they are wearing. What they remember is how they felt while they were there, that they left happy, and that they came back happy. Better communicators, given back to their families. If you are doing all of that, she said, the outcome has to be positive as well.

“Anybody providing excellent technical care but not an excellent experience is missing an opportunity to take care of more patients.”

Dr. West compares surgery to any customer-facing business, hotels included. Every patient walks in with a specific goal, whether that is glasses, a hearing aid or a transformative operation. In parallel there is the experience of getting to that goal, and some technically excellent providers deliver the first and fail the second. The result: I got a good result, but I couldn't stand the office.

Between two providers of similar technical competence, the one with the better experience wins, even by a fraction. He goes further: a team can deliver such a good experience that a patient will accept a less than perfect result. The ideal is both, done consistently, and few manage it. But anyone providing excellent care without an excellent experience is leaving patients on the table.

“The clinical outcome is what we do. The patient experience is how we make them feel.”

Dr. Campbell's frame is the cleanest: the clinical outcome is what we do, the patient experience is how we make them feel. He does surgery, and the families who bring their pets never see the procedure and may not know its details. What they know is how they felt when they arrived, when they picked up their pet, and when they went home.

Outcomes are the reason he gets up in the morning. But how people feel, he said, comes through intentionality and through multiple touch points in the care experience, and each of those has to be designed.

What the panel agrees on

  • Patients judge the care by how they felt, and they carry that judgment further than any clinical detail.
  • Between two equally skilled providers, the better experience wins, and it can even outweigh an imperfect result.
  • Every touch point, from the phone to the pick-up, is part of the treatment. Design them on purpose.
  • A great outcome with a poor experience costs you the patients that patient would have sent you.

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