Foundations for Creating an Exceptional Patient Experience

Customer service and customer satisfaction are at the forefront of the health care industry. Providing superior customer service is challenging in and of itself. Accomplishing this goal when the customer is facing an illness or crisis requires providers to be equipped with a unique set of tools. You, as a health care employee, are responsible for understanding who the customer is and what defines his or her essential needs.

Standardized systems that survey, monitor, and measure the quality and efficiency of care are in place. The introduction of the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey has given the health care customer a valuable method to express his or her perceptions of the hospital experience. This collected data will raise the bar for quality in hospital experiences.

This resource provides instruction for users to:

• Identify why people desire to work in health care
• Identify who the customer is in the health care industry
• Describe how the quality of care impacts the quality of service a customer receives
• Explain why customer service is important
• Define customer satisfaction
• Identify the five needs of every customer
• Identify external and internal customers and customer attributes
• Describe the cost of losing a customer in the health care industry
• Explain why HCAHPS is important in the health care and customer service industry
• Identify the reimbursement practices of the HCAHPS survey