Disruptive Expectations: Healthcare’s Customer Mindset Revolution

[Podcast: Part Two in a series.] Healthcare Success CEO Stewart Gandolf talks with Rob Klein, founder and CEO of healthcare marketing research firm, Klein & Partners, about how retail is learning healthcare a lot faster than healthcare is learning retail.

What is the new healthcare CUSTOMER mindset?

Rob Klein, our guest in this podcast, explains how the traditional patient is fast becoming a healthcare customer. The new consumer mindset and patient expectations are dramatic game changers for providers.

In fact, Rob explains, how “disruptive expectations” are shaping new consumer attitudes. Regardless of the care setting—a hospital visit, a physician office visit or urgent care—their expectations are no longer held within our industry. The typical mindset is a comparison of service that consumers experience with the convenience of online restaurant reservations or the high-touch and high-tech visit to an Apple store.

With the rollout of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the patient is less passive and accepting of their care experience. Now, patients are far more proactive in their service expectations, often drawing on retail or commercial experiences that often outdistance the typical hospital or medical office routine.

“Expectations—and patient attitudes—are very different from what they were just a few years ago,” Rob observes. And what’s fueling the shift in patient-now-consumer feelings? In part, Rob Klein speaks about how the ACA has shifted the landscape.

What’s more, healthcare consumers are losing their patience with understanding why healthcare can’t do things—such as communicating with providers via email or making appointments online—that are commonplace in other service sectors.

As another example, retailers are changing customer expectations about price transparency, Rob says. All too often a medical facility cannot tell an individual the cost of a procedure or visit. And that’s something that’s unacceptable in most retail settings.

In this podcast, Stewart Gandolf and Rob Klein recount real-world examples of how the experiential “old-school” is becoming unacceptable to newly empowered patients, and how re-inventing the nation’s healthcare delivery paradigm can improve patient satisfaction, protect and retain the patient base, and potentially improve outcomes.