Patient Experience's Future Lies Outside the Hospital

Some forward-looking healthcare organizations are already offering birthing centers, virtual exam rooms, and other types of outpatient care that emphasize the patient experience.

One of the biggest barriers to patient experience is the fact that most patients plain just don't want to be in your hospital.

Sometimes patient experience measures seem as pointless as dentists trying to improve the root canal experience—no matter what changes you make, everyone will always be focused on going home.

Of course, we know this isn't true—a positive patient experience has a tremendous impact on patients, not to mention on a provider's brand identity—but that doesn't stop it from often feeling like an uphill battle.

I was mulling over this predicament when I started to re-watch Netflix's "House of Cards" in preparation for the upcoming new season, and I was struck by some surprisingly apt advice from the show's antihero, Frank Underwood.

"We have to reverse our thinking," he said in season two. "When the wind's blowing at gale force, there's no point in sailing against it."

If patients don't want to experience care in your hospital setting, bring your care to them. In the future, the patient experience will not always be delivered in a hospital, and some forward-looking organizations are already working toward that goal.

Hospital-quality Care, Outside the Hospital
A major barrier to patient experience is due in part to the traditional, centralized hospital structure—where the cardiology, pediatric, oncology, and maternity departments are all on the same campus, or even the same building. In this model, improvements must be made piecemeal. For example, something that will improve a child's hospital stay may not apply to a heart patient, and vice versa.

This problem will diminish in the future, as a growing number of hospitals open and/or partner with specialized centers outside of the hospital setting, thus creating micro-environments ideal for tailored patient experiences.

Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center in Charlotte, NC, is following this trend by partnering with the city's first non-hospital birth center, which is just down the road from the 622-bed hospital.

The center, Baby+Company, operates five freestanding birth centers in North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Colorado, and has forged partnerships with several local hospitals. Its other North Carolina facility is partnered with WakeMed Health & Hospitals and has delivered about 125 babies in its first year, with some patients traveling from 60 miles away.

The centers offer a spa-like setting for mothers with low-risk pregnancies, who are guided through delivery by certified nurse midwives. Baby+Company's partner hospitals provide care if anything goes wrong. All Baby+Company patients in Charlotte are registered at Novant Health to ease any potential transfers.

"We want to make sure those patients can get to us in minutes," Chris Morris, MD, the center's medical director and one of the doctors at Providence OB/GYN told the Charlotte Observer. "We have tried to walk through every possible scenario… to make this as safe as possible for moms who choose to deliver there."

The Charlotte birthing center boasts three home-like delivery rooms that feature soothing colors, soaking tubs, walk-in showers, and soft bedding. Patients have the option of using exercise balls and aromatherapy candles.

For the right patients, centers like this offer the best of both worlds—hospital-quality care and the comforts of a non-hospital, home-like setting. In coming years, forward-looking hospitals will form similar partnerships or create stand-alone maternity and other outpatient centers of their own, with a high-focus on patient experience.

Virtual Hospital Care from Home
Telemedicine and  virtual exam rooms will likely play a big role in the future of the patient experience.

The USC Center for Body Computing is taking it one step further with its Virtual Care Clinic (VCC), a program that aims to connect smartphone owners with Keck Medicine of USC experts by using technologies developed at the USC Institute of Creative Technologies.

"Our Virtual Care Clinic is not only the democratization of healthcare allowing anyone access to our medical experts without leaving their home, but it also capitalizes on the promise that digital health is supposed to offer," Leslie Saxon, executive director of the Center for Body Computing, said in a press release.

"Because we have worked in collaboration with our VCC partners and our medical experts, this healthcare model will empower patients, improve quality outcomes with more precision medicine analytics and diagnosis, and enhance the physician-patient relationship by creating seamless communication that puts the patient in the driver's seat of their own healthcare experience and outcomes."

The center is also partnering with private sector companies such as Doctor Evidence, IMS Health, Karten Design, Medable, Planet Grande, Proteus Digital Health, and VSP Global to deliver wireless, on-demand medical care to patients by using mobile apps, virtual doctors, data collection, and analysis systems and wearable sensors.

"University-based medical centers like ours are natural sources of healthcare innovation, given the focus on basic science, clinical and translational research," says Thomas Jackiewicz, senior vice president and chief executive officer of Keck Medicine of USC.

"But to achieve truly transformational medicine, we have to collaborate with the private sector, particularly the digital health and technology companies like our VCC partners. Innovative patient care models such as our VCC will create operational efficiencies and cost-savings, allowing us to refocus resources back into more innovation and constantly improve the patient experience."

Virtual care will greatly change the patient experience, and it may not be as far off as you might think. There's an opportunity here for early adopter hospitals to use virtual care offerings as a differentiator and increase their marketshare.