Be our guest...The doctor will see you now. Defining patient experience in a medical clinic

Original art in the halls, trendy lobbies, concierge service, coffee bars, and designer rooms – sound like a five-star hotel, or the neighborhood doctor’s office, or both? Over the years, medical clinics and hospitals have tried to address the ever increasing hospitality expectations of their patients. Defining what patients expect from their medical facility is a moving target, even after over 20 years of study. Patients have more ways to research medical facilities than ever before: from the mandated HCAHPS hospital survey to social media review sites like Yelp and Google Reviews. How a facility is performing is now, not only public knowledge, but consumer knowledge. If a medical clinic is to prosper in today’s competitive health care market, what exactly patients want and expect from their clinic must be discovered in order for the clinics to successfully cultivate existing patients and attract new ones. No current survey like HCAHPS exists for non-emergency medical clinics or doctor’s offices. This study seeks to determine which satisfaction variables and themes impact a patient’s intent to return to a medical clinic and to develop a survey to measure those variables. The study will add to the existing patient experience research, exploring the integration of hospitality concepts to the medical field by providing empirical data measuring patient intent to return. For clinic administrators, this research may help identify areas of expertise, in other words, departments or individuals who are ‘getting it right’ and should be rewarded and emulated. This resulting survey may also offer administrators assistance in identifying any existing gaps between what the patient visitor expected from their clinical experience and what the employees thought was being offered. Knowing about existing gaps could help guide employee training in an effective and efficient manner. In addition, developing or monitoring a clinic’s business plan, marketing strategy, employee training, or even a mission statement could be enhanced by knowing what that clinic’s patients are expecting. Taking an alternative approach to the existing hospital-specific HCAHPS survey, by offering an original clinic-specific survey, avoids the shortcomings of trying to adapt a broad, general set of questions that are administered at random times to unique clinics and even departments. The medical clinic industry has probably never been considered a hospitality industry – but the paradigm is changing and this study may help medical clinics and researchers render a patient experience benchmark for subsequent monitoring.

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