Burbank, CA — Enter your typical American hospital. Sign your name on a clipboard, wait for your name to be called, complete lots of paperwork, wait some more …
At the Roy and Patricia Disney Family Cancer Center, they do things a little differently. Most of the people who walk through their doors are in long-term treatment plans. So, the Center treats them like returning guests – recognizing them instantly and customizing every element of the experience to their preferences.
Here’s how that actually works in healthcare:
Each new patient is given an ID badge, like the one you probably wear to work. Inside it is a smart RFID chip – the same technology that lets UPS automatically scan and track packages as they move around the country, but this chip carries a lot more than an address.
The badges include a person’s identification (name, record number, treatment plan, doctor, etc.) and their favorite things (colors, music and vacation). When someone walks through the front door wearing a badge, the chip inside instantly alerts a concierge who walks over to personally greets her and takes her to her first treatment.
Each room recognizes the badge, too – automatically changing to meet that patient’s preferences, like dimming the lights, playing favorite music, even displaying custom images inside testing machines. If billing or treatment information is needed, patients aren’t asked to fill out forms; instead, they simply scan the badge.
This Cancer Center is located in San Fernando Valley. It caters to customers who are used to high-end hotels and personalized services. The approach they take is focusing on human touch and human interaction to promote healing through nurturing spaces inside and out.
The simple experience of the badges vs. the typical fill-out-forms-and-wait expectation delivers perfectly on that mission. That’s what experience strategy is in healthcare.
Customer experience strategy: It’s not a mismatch of best practices that may be great for someone. It’s a collection of actions and interactions that align with brand strategy and represent the brand in some ownable, hard to replicate way that people come to not only count on but delight in.
The experiences we build don’t just make taking care of your health more pleasant or easy, they make people more successful. They inspire us in small ways, fit in our lives and obvious ways, and generally make doing better seem like the most natural thing in the world.
Posted by: Leigh Householder
photo credit: midnightcomm via photopin cc
