Video Provides Keen Insight Into Customer Engagement

Ron Halverson, PhD, for HealthLeaders News, August 1, 2007

We've all heard the phrase "Customer is king." Customer-centricity is the rage as marketers strive to refocus on enhancing the customer experience.

Shouldn't this same focus be applied to healthcare? Why shouldn't hospitals be looking at their strategies from a patient-centric perspective?

Fred Lee, author of If Disney Ran Your Hospital- 9 1/2 Things You Would Do Differently, says that service organizations, such as hospitals, need to stop focusing on "service" and start focusing on "experience" like Disney does--and I could not agree more.

On one hand, we know that delivering patient-centric care means looking at clinical outcomes. For example, recent research has demonstrated the importance of communication in preventing medical errors. From a marketing perspective, however, it means looking at the interactions between patient and staff, and the relationships formed in those interactions--the compassion, understanding, patience, and overall patient experience. I once heard someone say that patients expect things to get done to them, not with them. Focusing on the with is what patient-centricity is all about.

The problem is: How do hospitals gain deep insights into the patient experience? Video analytics offer valuable and untapped tools for developing such insights.

Our research reveals that developing a satisfying customer experience can translate into greater revenues. A recent study by HR Solutions found that patient satisfaction drives patient loyalty, and patient loyalty drives long-term financial performance.

One of the primary factors related to patient satisfaction, according to the survey, is employee engagement. The research, which looked at the linkage between employee engagement and patient satisfaction, found that of the employees surveyed:

• 85 percent believe that engaged employees show an attitude of genuinely caring about the patient
  
• 91 percent believe engaged employees signify that the organization is committed to quality patient care
  
• 75 percent believe that engaged employees reflect a better quality of care than its competitors

Hospitals often rely on patient surveys to capture information about their experiences and future intentions. Although surveys shed light into the overall hospital experience, they do not provide the point-of-contact insights that are needed to drive optimal decision-making and lasting change. How interactive is the staff? What are the specific behaviors that convey a sense of engagement? What issues might be influencing their ability to keep patients informed of wait times? Do patients flow easily through the admissions process? What bottlenecks are there, if any? Are they projecting an image that is in line with the hospital's mission? What are the problems in these interactions? It is answers to these questions that can drive improvement in the patient and employee experience.

Harnessing Engagement to Drive Results
What many marketers do not realize, however, is that they already have this real-time information at their fingertips --- they just need to tap into it. How? Through the surveillance video they're already capturing, or through strategically placed video cameras. In addition to using surveillance video for security and risk management issues, savvy hospitals will zero in on the potential in this tool.

Video-enabled behavioral analytics can produce understanding about patient-employee interactions that can drive patient experience improvements and increase revenue. Video analytics offers a detailed, objective study of actual communication. Unlike traditional methods, where an observer takes rich field notes for later analysis, video analytics provides a permanent record of encounters. This allows for a level of detailed exploration of particular encounters impossible for an observer, or even a team of observers.

The quantified encounters can be compared across multiple settings to identify patterns. This quantification also allows us to build upon traditional survey data, enabling the use of techniques typically unavailable to the ethnographer. As an added bonus, the final product can include not only an understanding of how particular tensions might produce miscommunication, but also a video record full of powerful examples that can help others understand these insights.

For example, the admission encounter could be coded for friendliness and caring, and those ratings could be related to patient satisfaction survey data. The accuracy of the initial patient interview can be diagnosed to discover patterns in interaction that make errors in patient care less likely.

Like any method, this approach has limitations. The richness of the data requires substantial resources for analysis and interpretation. However, given the stakes and the potential gains, these investments can be returned many times over. The essential need to protect employee and patient confidentiality also requires considerable care, although established methods are available to protect confidentiality (e.g., removing identifiers from the data and informed consent).

The value of video analytics makes overcoming the hurdles worthwhile. The marriage of the quantitative coding of the video and qualitative insights of the seasoned observer produces results with certainty. Video analytics deliver actionable intelligence--real-time, mission-critical insights--that marketers need to improve operations, make more effective decisions, drive employee commitment, and deliver a superior patient experience.

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Ron Halverson, PhD, is a the founder and President of the Halverson Group, an organizational R+D firm that specializes in helping companies use research to understand and improve customer and employee experience. He may be reached at ron@halversongroup.com.