Healthcare Hospitality Doesn’t Have to be ‘One More Thing’

Recent directives from health system executives urging staff to channel “hospitality energy” have generated a backlash from healthcare provider organizations, nurses, and physicians. It’s easy to understand why.

The prevailing sentiment among doctors and nurses is that focusing on hospitality and patient experience comes at a cost, and cynicism is the zeitgeist. In other words, “If you want to turn this Howard Johnson of a hospital into the Ritz-Carlton you’re going to need to upgrade the facility and hire more staff. We don’t have ’one more thing‘ to give; we’re here to save lives and putting little chocolates on patients’ pillows is a no-go when you’re npo.”  

However, from the perspective of a hospital executive, focusing on hospitality–providing a superior level of individualized service – makes perfect business sense. The healthcare market continues to contract, and the payer mix has become less financially advantageous to hospitals each year. Patients have also become more discerning, well aware of the diminishing value of their healthcare dollars. Given the milieu of negative public sentiment toward the healthcare and insurance sectors in general, it seems like a good time to enhance the service provided in the acute-care setting. Improving service is an ideal differentiator and a highly visible change that might reap immediate returns.

Growing patient demand for digital services

With regard to the purest form of hospitality, hotels have been storing customer preferences (room types, dietary restrictions, past visits) in property management systems for years. Imagine, if you will, how mind-blowing it would be to check into a hospital emergency room (ER) and have the registration clerk acknowledge you with a warm smile and eye contact, followed by a friendly greeting the same way they do at the front desk of a hotel: “Hello, Doctor Schrager, thank you for coming in today. I am so sorry that you are not feeling well. I know you had to wait more than two hours in the waiting room when you were here with your wife over the holidays, and I want to make sure your visit today is more comfortable. I see that you and your wife appreciated having a quiet room last time you were here and that you prefer to see an attending physician. I will make sure to communicate that to the care team. I want you to know that if you encounter any issues today, I am the first person you should come to and here is the direct number or way you can get in touch with me. And, if you do end up getting admitted, I will make sure to request a single room and have some root beer and fresh fruit waiting for you (if the doctor says it’s ok).”  I honestly might check myself into my own ER at the end of a long shift.  

Patients are demanding better service in the form of digital access; hospital executives are strategically thinking about it; the doctors, nurses and healthcare staff in the hospital would proudly champion it if it was easy for them to do, and the rest of the service sector has a bounty of experience on how to do this well. Let’s learn from our service-industry peers and invest in technology and best practices that have proven results. 

What healthcare can learn from the airline industry

I know, yet another healthcare and airline industry comparison, but bear with me.The experience of being a patient entering the hospital or emergency department and the experience of flying as an airline passenger share some key characteristics. First, these experiences are rare, expensive, and therefore confusing to the uninitiated. Therefore, timely information accessibility is a paramount concern. 

Patients and passengers often don’t understand the standard operating procedures. They are effectively surrendering themselves to what is usually a very uncomfortable day of travel (or an even more uncomfortable day in the ER or hospital) with the understanding that the staff will do their best to make them more comfortable, less afraid, and ultimately keep them safe through the end of their visit. 

They are doing so with the understanding that their day will undoubtedly change course at unexpected times and that they will be kept abreast of these changes. There is also the idea that there is a mythical “someone” at the airline or in the hospital who exists to handle these exigencies. We know, from working in the industry, that this mythical someone is actually a complex meshwork of different systems and verticals. Hospitals have them and airlines have them–but what is missing, in the eyes of the patient (and not, today, for the air traveler) is vision into the high-level output of those different verticals.  

Here are a few examples of ways that airline industry applications provide air travelers with up-to-date information and access to ancillary services:

• Flight delay notifications
• Bag on board notifications
• Help desk access and AI/LLM helpdesk chatbots
• Scheduling through app and link to phone schedulers
• Billing information
• Travel records and receipts
• Linkage to external applications, such as calendar apps, credit card programs, car rentals, and travel websites

The truth of the matter is that the modern consumer dictated their demands with regard to communication, technology, and access long ago, and healthcare just hasn’t picked up on it yet. 

The technology exists to guide patients in real-time with constant patient + family communication throughout urgent care, emergency and inpatient visits. AI is being used at progressive hospitals to predict wait times, explain test results, assign education, and simplify discharge documentation.

We ought to adopt new tech-based systems that have well-established predecessors in other service industries like air travel to enable healthcare providers to deliver stellar service to their patients.