customers – The Health Care Blog

Patients are NOT Customers

Mar 21, 2015• 27

By SHIRIE LENG, MD

Recently I wrote about the problems with Maintenance of Certification requirements. One of the phrases I read repeatedly when I was researching the piece was “the patient as customer.” Here’s a quote from the online journal produced by Accenture, the management consulting company:

Patients are less forgiving of poor service than they once were, and the bar keeps being raised higher because of the continually improving service quality offered by other kinds of companies with whom patients interact—overnight delivery services, online retailers, luxury auto dealerships and more. With these kinds of cross-sector comparisons now the norm, hospitals will have to venture beyond the traditional realm of merely providing world-class medical care. They must put in place the operations and processes to satisfy patients through differentiated experiences that engender greater loyalty. The key is to approach patients as customers, and to design the end-to-end patient experience accordingly.

Except for one thing. Patients are NOT customers.

The definition of a “customer” is a person or entity that obtains a service or product from another person or entity in exchange for money. Customers can buy either goods or services. Health care is classified by the government as a service industry because it provides an intangible thing rather than an actual thing. If you buy a good, like a car, you voluntarily decide to shop around and get the best car you can for the price. Even a vacation, especially a vacation package or a cruise, is a good. A nice dinner, while a good in the sense of the food, is also a service. You buy the services of the cook and servers.

Here is why the patient shouldn’t be considered a customer, at least not in the business sense.

1. Patients are not on vacation. They are not in the mindset that they are sitting in the doctors office or the hospital to have a good time. They are not relaxed, they have not left their troubles temporarily behind them. They have not bought room service and a massage. They are not in the mood to be happy. They would rather not be requiring the service they are requesting. Which leads to number 2:

2. Patients have not chosen to buy the service. Patients have been forced to seek the service, in most cases.

3. Patients are not paying for the service. At least not directly. And they have no idea what the price is anyway.

4. Patients are not buying a product from which they can demand a positive outcome. Sometimes the result of the service is still illness and/or death. This does not mean the service provided was not a good one.

5. The patient is not always right. A patient cannot, or should not, go to a doctor demanding certain things. They should demand good care, but that care might mean denying the patient what the patient thinks he or she needs. The doctor is not a servant; she does not have to do everything the patient wants. She is obligated to do everything the patient needs.

6. Patient satisfaction does not always correlate with the quality of the product.A patient who is given antibiotics for a cold is very satisfied but has gotten poor quality care. A patient who gets a knee scope for knee pain might also be very satisfied, despite the fact that such surgery has been shown to have little actual benefit in many types of knee pain.

Who’s Running Your Company: You or Your Client?

Jun 1, 2012

By Alan Ying, MD

Venture capitalists like to use the word “traction.” It sounds all glamorous, like an ad showing a Range Rover toughing it out up some impossible incline. But when I hear a company talk about ‘early traction’ in its pitch, I’m always leery of the “First and Worst” effect.

My first customer at my first company was a grandfatherly CIO at a big hospital. Of course I wanted to please him, and was enthusiastic about doing so. But I was also very focused on taking over the world with our software. I told him, “We’ll change anything you want about the product, as long as it’ll be good for all our future [gazillion] customers.”

Of course, The Grandfather wanted lots of one-off customizations that would really only be good for him. I told him that all the time we spent doing custom work for him was going to make us less profitable, and less likely to be able to sell the product to other people. And to survive long enough to do any improvements to the product at all, we needed to be profitable. He seemed to think that made sense, and begrudgingly agreed.

In the end this arrangement was a win for both of us. Our product was a home run for his hospital. We got an evangelical reference customer, and his hospital helped make our product better. The precedent we’d set with The Grandfather gave us the courage to refuse other customers who wanted one-off changes. Sure, we could have done this for one or two hospitals, but by the time we got to hospital 300, it would have been a mess.