Do You Need a Designated Patient Experience Manager?
When physicians branch out to start their own membership-based practice, they often begin with a checklist of roles they’ll need to fill.
As they write out certain obvious needs, like receptionist, nurse, or physician’s assistant, they also tend to look at how the more established practices in this space are structured. When they look at practices in the ROAMD network, they often notice a particular role dedicated to patient experience — the patient experience manager, or director of patient experience.
Now they’re wondering, Is this something I really need right now?
If you’re a smaller practice just starting out or looking to grow, your resources may be limited. It can be hard to justify hiring certain roles right off the bat. Often (and understandably), the role of a patient experience manager is the first to be put on the back burner.
But when should you consider the idea again? Do you need to? Is a dedicated patient experience manager necessary? Isn’t the patient experience everyone’s job?
To facilitate discussion on these questions, we’ll first look at three points on patient experience and why the patient experience management role exists at all. Then, we’ll more fully define what a patient experience manager does and walk through the pros and cons of the position.
3 Thoughts Behind the Dedicated Role for Patient Experience
If you’re practicing membership-based medicine, you already understand the value of ensuring patients receive a world-class experience in your office. So while you may not have the resources to hire a dedicated patient experience manager today, that doesn’t mean you’re abandoning the concept.
First, we all realize patient experience drives business. It’s not just a luxury. It factors heavily into retention, and it’s what determines whether a patient raves about your office to their friends, family, and colleagues, driving referrals and new memberships.
Second, patient experience is indeed everyone’s job, despite the existence of a role called “patient experience manager.” Everyone from the front desk to the physician provides the patient with an outstanding experience.
Because of this, one solution many practices turn to is customer service (or patient experience) training for their office. They prepare everyone with the necessary skills and mindset needed to provide patients with world-class service at every stage of their journey.
Third, while it’s true that patient experience is everyone’s job, a designated patient experience manager is still an extremely important role that practices can work toward filling sustainably as they grow.
What Is a Patient Experience Manager?
Concierge and DPC medicine aren’t simply another version of the same old sick care. They’re health care. This model of medicine is so much more than just dealing with medical dilemmas, and part of that is providing an outstanding experience every time we interact with patients.
The patient experience manager is a person whose sole responsibility is to manage the patient experience in ways that set the practice up for success.
In addition to the physician, the patient experience manager becomes the face of the business in the eyes of your patients. While patients should have the closest relationship with their physician, the next closest relationship will be with the patient experience manager.
In many ways, the patient experience manager functions as conductor of the orchestra that is your business. They’re the ones who know the full job responsibilities and talents of everyone in the practice, including the physician. They’re also a confidante to patients, someone who builds relationships beyond a clinical context and lets the physician know when a patient is going through a tough time.
These managers act as a coordinating focal point for the entire office, orchestrating the symphony of each patient’s experience.
Advantages of Having a Designated Patient Experience Manager
There are some clear advantages to having a dedicated patient experience manager, both for the patient and the practice.
1. Saves Everyone Time
Time is a luxury. It’s something no one can buy, regardless of wealth, social status, or who they may know.
A patient experience manager saves everyone time.
On the practice side, the patient experience manager acts as the one-stop-shop for everything concerning the patient. On the patient side, the experience manager acts as the major point of contact. The patient has complete clarity on who to communicate with — and when there’s clarity, there’s no wasted time passing the phone around.
By saving the patient time and avoiding the frustration of who do I call with this question, you automatically create a sense of luxury within the patient experience.
2. Improves Staff Experience
Just as the patient experience manager provides clarity for the patient, they also provide it for staff. Despite the desire to provide amazing service, the science-minded heroes of healthcare who are comfortable with the clinical aspects of practice may be a little shy in the high-service, human-touch elements of the patient experience.
Filling the role of patient experience manager with an outside-the-healthcare-box thinker, someone with a creative mindset, can help your patient experience reach a new level.
It can also allow your staff to breathe a sigh of relief and focus on their jobs, knowing the patient experience is being guided by someone with an expert grasp of guest service.
3. Provides Consistency
Having a dedicated patient experience manager ensures consistency in the quality of the patient experience. As the conductor, they help the practice deliver the same world-class experience every time.
Many practices have standard operating procedures in place, but for those to be effective, they need someone to champion them. A patient experience manager ensures SOPs are actually followed. They protect practice culture, both through these SOPs and also by helping to identify and onboard new, great-fit hires who value the customer experience regardless of whether they’re scheduling an appointment or drawing blood.
4. Frees Up Physicians to Focus on Patient Health
In smaller practices, maintaining SOPs and ensuring consistency often falls on the physician. But managing the practice, managing their patients’ care, and also managing the patient experience is a huge load for a physician to undertake.
Having a separate, dedicated person who can champion the cause frees up the physician to focus on patient health.
Downsides to Hiring a Designated Experience Manager
It’s possible that hiring a dedicated patient experience manager could create the mentality in some staff that patient experience is not their job. This is where careful attention to hiring people who share your values for world-class service makes a huge difference.
The most obvious disadvantage to hiring a dedicated patient experience manager is the cost. It’s another position you have to pay for, which is probably the biggest limiting factor for practices seeking to grow. That’s a legitimate hurdle, but when practices are able, they can consider the potential return on their investment in the role. It typically more than pays for itself, and drives growth rather than limits it.
Alternatives to Hiring a Designated Patient Experience Manager
If you’re not ready to hire a dedicated person but still want to take definite steps toward stewarding the patient experience, you can try an alternative solution. We touched on it briefly already: training.
There are various customer service and guest experience training programs you can send your staff to. However, few are geared toward healthcare, and those that are only train staff on the basics. They don’t quite measure up to the luxury, world-class experience we aim for in membership medicine.
To address this lack, ROAMD is developing a patient experience training program we’ll be offering to our members. With its focus on the intersection of hospitality and healthcare in real-world clinical spaces, the program will tackle the practical applications of top-tier patient experience principles in concierge and DPC practices.
Members will also be able to participate in monthly training through the ROAMD app. Collaborative discussions, individualized goals, and community support will bring the training to life and keep the patient experience momentum moving upward.
Beyond the patient experience training for your staff, those who join ROAMD for the new program also become part of a greater network of like-minded physicians who are enthusiastic about mutual learning, collaboration, and progress.
As time goes on, we fully expect the ROAMD training program to grow and evolve as we gain new insights from members and as external circumstances shift in new ways. For example, guest service training on COVID didn’t exist before 2020. But when the pandemic hit, ROAMD physicians and patient experience managers came together online in real time to talk through problems and workshop solutions for the betterment of their patients.
When you become a ROAMD member, you gain access to this community and these resources. We invite you to visit the ROAMD membership page to learn more.
Frank Hernandez serves as the Chief Executive Officer at ROAMD, where membership-based, concierge, DPC and private medicine, all come together to transform the traditional healthcare industry as we know it. Frank’s experience in world-class luxury hospitality and network-based organizations gives him a unique perspective that he is passionate about in sharing with the world. Prior to ROAMD, Frank worked as Chef Concierge at renowned Halekulani in the heart of Honolulu for over 20 years. He studied humanities at California State University Monterey Bay, and Hospitality Management at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is a former board member, and current professional affiliate of Les Clefs d’Or USA, the country’s number one organization for the most elite hotel concierges.
-02.svg)