Research Update: Looking at Consumer Expectations from Both Sides

// By Jane Weber Brubaker //

How is healthcare doing in terms of meeting customer expectations? Doctor.com surveyed 1,718 patients in 2018 to assess their needs and preferences regarding the customer experience of healthcare.

Kaufman Hall’s latest survey focuses on consumerism from the provider side, and offers an analysis of where 425 respondents from 200 healthcare organizations rate themselves on everything from improving customer experience to providing price transparency.

In this article, we’ll share highlights from both surveys, one confirming that consumers have high expectations of providers, the other showing positive movement but slow progress in meeting those expectations.

To add some perspective, we grabbed a few snippets from Chris Bevolo’s conversation with Matt Gove, “Owning the Experience” from a recent episode of the Joe Public Book Club. Gove is chief consumer experience officer at Piedmont Healthcare and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of eHealthcare Strategy & Trends.

“We don’t pay attention as closely as we should to what [consumers] want from us, and because of it, we risk losing control of our fate. And that’s a dangerous place to be,” Gove says. But he allows that some health organizations are living up to standards set by other industries, as we’ll see.

Log in below to access this content: