Healthcare Service Recovery 101: Mastering Best Practices

Healthcare today is evolving into a consumer-focused industry, necessitating an increased focus on service recovery in healthcare. A mainstay of the hospitality and travel industries for decades, service recovery refers to listening to and addressing customer (or in this case, patient) concerns before they make a bottom-line impact. And increasingly, there’s a case for hospital service recovery.

Top healthcare providers are increasingly embracing this practice. Whether engaging in service recovery at a hospital, clinic, or skilled nursing facility (SNF), providers are bringing patients into the clinical conversation and designing facilities and services around their specific needs. This also means stepping in when patients and their family members have questions about their care, listening when expectations fall short, and rectifying issues whenever possible.

This new approach in healthcare can help traditional providers remain viable in an era of increased competition. But some providers lack the tools to perform service recovery — while others lack an understanding of why it’s so crucial in this changing landscape.

The Case for Service Recovery in Healthcare

Consumer demands were heavily present among health CEOs’ top five concerns, which included:

• Financial challenges
• Government mandates
• Personnel shortages
• Patient safety & quality
• Patient satisfaction

And healthcare leaders have good reason to focus on consumer demands, considering that:

Patients Want Greater Involvement in Their Treatment

38 percent of patients said they preferred to make healthcare decisions in tandem with their doctor. Meanwhile, no patients said they wanted doctors to make decisions without consulting them first.

Healthcare Service Recovery Expectations Are High

E-commerce giant Amazon, hotel chain Hilton, and Southwest Airlines all outranked hospitals when it came to satisfaction. This suggests that there’s a tremendous opportunity at hand for service recovery in hospitals.

Healthcare Competition Has Greatly Increased

Consumer-focused healthcare services are on the rise. Patients spend nearly $18 billion on urgent care providers, where 20% of all primary care visits now take place. Services like on-demand telehealth appointments and membership-based primary care services make it even more challenging for traditional providers to stand out.

All in all, the consumer-focused healthcare sector is expected to grow 6% in the next year. This makes service recovery in healthcare an essential way for providers to stand out from the competition.

Healthcare Service Recovery Must Emphatically Include Patients at Every Stage

To embrace healthcare consumerism, you must build patient preferences into every stage of the journey. In other words, you must take a second look at everything from billing to IT, facilities, administration, and HR. All in all, it can feel like a lot.

A good place to start, however, is giving frontline staff these five tactics when caring for patients and their family members:

• Listen: Conduct patient experience surveys
• Offer an apology: Recognize patients’ issue without taking blame
• Offer to help: Suggest a way to make things right
• Follow through: Ensure that issues have been taken care of
• Keep it professional: Offer great customer service, even when frustrated

Service Recovery in Healthcare: the Future of the Industry

At this point, hospitals today operate on narrow margins. To that end, losing even one patient over poor customer service is too many. 

Complicating matters, most organizations still use traditional surveys to track and monitor patient satisfaction metrics, making it much harder for them to discover healthcare service recovery opportunities in time.

In contrast, Q Reviews makes it easy for patients to provide real-time patient feedback. We also make it easier for healthcare leaders to improve service based on this feedback. Our service recovery tools consequently help shift the focus onto the patient. In that way, you can promote a culture of service excellence.

What We Do

Interested in learning more? Let’s talk.

Based in New York City, Quality Reviews^®, Inc. was founded by leading healthcare providers and entrepreneurs with a total of 30-plus years of clinical, healthcare administrative, and tech experience. Quality Reviews^®, Inc. builds proprietary software to help healthcare provider organizations capture and analyze real-time patient feedback to make service recovery easier.

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