The heart of healthcare delivery
Patient experience is at the heart of healthcare delivery, grounded in the principles of compassion and empathy. Its earliest expression can perhaps be traced back to the Hippocratic Oath.
A positive patient experience is widely recognised as essential to delivering high quality, safe and value-driven healthcare services - especially in a field where the stakes are so high. In healthcare negative experiences can have serious consequences. Common patient complaints often involve long wait times, poor communication and feeling unheard. These issues can accumulate, leaving individuals disillusioned with their healthcare providers and services, and also preventing them from gaining the empowerment and engagement they need to actively participate in their healthcare management and make informed decisions. Ultimately, this disengagement can lead to patients refusing to seek or receive both preventative and treatment-level care. To encourage patients to play a more active role in managing their health and care, it is critical to remove barriers, reduce friction and create a more supportive and accessible healthcare environment.
While analysing patient reviews across a broad spectrum of providers in the Middle East, the significant majority focus on the human interactions experienced, rather than the clinical outcomes. Patients highlight aspects such as friendliness, clear and understandable communication, and compassionate care, as key to their experience.
This suggests that our perception of healthcare is deeply connected to the quality of human interactions experienced - with the most important moments of a patient's care often linked to how well their anxieties and fears have been acknowledged and managed.
Healthcare professionals (HCPs) also value these human interactions, but face increasing challenges with finding the time required for delivering empathetic care in today's demanding healthcare systems.
The global crisis of deteriorating population health and wellbeing is well documented and, unfortunately, further compounded by the rising levels of burnout in the HCP workforce across all parts of our health systems. Despite this, HCPs aspire to and are expected to deliver exemplary patient experiences, whether as individuals or part of a team. This relationship between HCP wellbeing and patient experience is symbiotic - without addressing both simultaneously, healthcare ecosystems risk falling short of their full potential in delivering patient care and achieving optimal outcomes.
Leveraging my background in healthcare strategy, transformation, and patient safety, along with my colleague Oliver David Sear's expertise in human-centred design and user experience, we've developed a synergistic approach to patient experience programmes.
Our approach is built on the Quadruple Aim — a framework focused on enhancing patient experience, improving population health, reducing costs and supporting healthcare providers.
In the coming months, we will explore how a shared vision of HCP wellbeing and exemplary patient experience can be embedded into a human-centred healthcare system. This will include looking beyond healthcare and drawing insights from other industries, such as hospitality and aerospace, where personalisation and seamless digital-physical integration have transformed service delivery.
In this, the first edition of our blog series, we will examine the importance of the symbiotic relationship between HCP wellbeing and positive patient experience.
A symbiotic relationship: HCP wellbeing and patient experience
A fundamental pillar in the patient experience journey is the interaction between the patient and the various healthcare professionals that they encounter.
Most HCPs choose their careers in order to improve the lives of others: to care, to treat and to have a true sense of purpose in society. When HCPs find joy and satisfaction in their work, they are most likely to contribute to a positive patient experience. And the recognition of their contribution further reinforces their own wellbeing.
However, healthcare delivery is often constrained by inefficiencies, poorly designed processes and technology, staffing and resource limitations, which can often lead to suboptimal wellbeing and burnout for the HCP, therefore lowering the levels of patient experience.
The importance of HCP wellbeing, and its influence on care delivery, is not new. In 2014 the Triple Aim was expanded to the Quadruple Aim with the addition of clinician and workforce wellbeing and satisfaction, while the COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the reality and risk of HCP burnout, which remains a global challenge. Burnout erodes interpersonal skills, harms team dynamics, and increases the risk of errors, contributing to low morale and toxic work cultures.
While working with our own clients to maximise their patients’ experiences, we have clearly seen in action how this relationship between the wellbeing of HCPs and the experiences of patients are synergistically linked. Addressing these issues requires a tandem approach that tackles both areas simultaneously, and strategically. This approach should be grounded in a human-centred design (HCD) philosophy, using a service design approach that places equal value on the patient and care providers.
Human-centred design (HCD): Enhancing patient experience and provider wellbeing
Human-centred design has quickly proven its value by demonstrating tangible results, and has been widely adopted, particularly in this era of digital transformation. As Steve Jobs famously noted, the key to success is to "start at the experience and work back to the technology."
This highlights the need for a more holistic approach to design. Service design by nature leverages HCD principles, empowering service providers and ensuring that customers' needs are met.
In healthcare, as in many other industries, HCD can now play a transformative role by addressing challenges with empathy for both care providers and patients. It ensures that healthcare services and technologies are crafted with the end-user in mind, whether patients or HCPs, by capturing critical ‘moments that matter’ throughout the care journey.
On the physical side, HCD enhances workflows to reduce friction and create more seamless interactions. For example, it optimises waiting room processes for comfort and speed, and makes patient rounding more meaningful by focusing on personal connection and empathy. Physical spaces, like exam rooms, are also redesigned to make patients feel more comfortable and less anxious.
On the digital side, HCD ensures that technology is relatable, intuitive, and supports fluid transitions between in-person and digital care. For example, by refining telemedicine platforms and EHR systems, HCD improves usability for both patients and providers, ensuring that digital touchpoints don’t feel cumbersome or disconnected from physical care. Patient portals can be designed to allow easy access to test results, appointment scheduling, and communication with healthcare providers, creating a more personalised and interactive experience.
Additionally, HCD focuses on reducing provider burnout by designing tools and systems that minimise administrative tasks, allowing HCPs to spend more time on compassionate, patient-centred care. By ensuring that digital tools (like EHRs) and physical environments (like nurse stations) are optimised for ease and efficiency, HCD creates a balance between human interaction and technology-driven solutions.
HCD helps us not just find solutions, but ensures that we solve the right problems, with a human-first approach.
Look, listen and understand
A fundamental component in improving HCP wellbeing and patient experience is to always be carefully monitoring, and seeking to listen, look and understand.
Other industries, especially in the service sector, have long recognised the importance of listening to consumers and service users, but healthcare has been slower to adopt this approach.
Initiatives, such as the NHS Friends and Family Test (FFT), are simple approaches to gauge happiness or satisfaction with a service, but lack granularity. Increasingly, the use of Patient Reported Experience Measures (PREMS) offers a more comprehensive and standardised approach with metrics to allow comparison and improvement programmes. Providers are increasingly adopting patient experience teams and PREMS reporting structures through to senior leadership.
For HCPs, these PREMS can be perceived as challenging, requiring leadership to position and utilise them appropriately. It is also important to understand that patient responses are not rating the technical skills of the HCP, but instead offering insight into the non-technical aspects that are key to so many moments of care provision, including communication and shared decision-making. Most patient feedback is positive, and this can greatly enhance HCPs' sense of purpose and the joy they derive from patient care.
Listening to patients is only one side of this tandem approach. The HCPs who work every day in the culture, systems and processes of an organisation also hold a wealth of information. When actively listened to, their insights can drive improvements in efficiency and effectiveness, reducing aspects of work that increase burnout risk, and in turn improve the patient experience.
Beyond listening, there is a need to observe; watching and recording patients and HCPs as they interact with the health system, mapping journeys and workflows. This helps us understand how both groups are impacted by the environment and processes, both positively and negatively.
Only by looking and listening to both patients and HCPs can we genuinely understand the moments that matter to both groups.
Technology: A double-edged sword
Time is an essential enabler to improving both HCP wellbeing and the patient experience. Technology can help to relieve the administrative burden for HCPs, so they can redirect their time for purposeful patient engagement, communication, care and empathy, leading to greater job satisfaction for HCPs as well as a better patient experience.
Global evidence shows that up to 50% of a HCPs day is spent on documentation and administrative tasks. 1Increasingly this is encroaching into afterhours requirements with a higher risk of burnout. Additionally, studies show that excessive use of screens by HCPs can inhibit communication leading to poor patient satisfaction scores and increased complaints.
Programmes, such as the Hawaii Pacific Health Model “Stop Stupid Stuff” acknowledge and address the processes, operations and technologies that are currently not designed around the humans operating within them2. Listening to and empowering staff who are working in the system allows them to identify and remove the “stupid stuff”, significantly reducing the burden and improving efficiency and happiness all-round.
The patient experience is also heavily impacted by the technology they encounter on their healthcare journeys. From digital front doors to call centres, virtual consultations to wearable devices, our patients are increasingly surrounded by technology-enabled healthcare applications, which can both enhance and detract from a positive experience.
As the healthtech landscape continues to evolve at pace, fuelled by expanding use-cases for emerging technologies, such as machine learning and AI, it is imperative that this future should be built on human design principles. It is also key to remain mindful of the potential impacts these technologies can have on both HCP wellbeing and the patient experience, and the delicate balances that emerge in this new paradigm.
What’s next? Integrating empathy, technology and data
Viewing patient experience and HCP wellbeing through an empathetic lens will amplify positive outcomes for both. Service design provides a valuable tool to understand both aspects more holistically, allowing us to dive deeper into the key moments that matter, and build human-centred strategies focused on the most important element of healthcare: the people. This will ensure a lasting positive impact across the healthcare ecosystem as a whole.
As technology continues to grow exponentially, we must be mindful to use it to enhance human connections, not replace them. Simply applying technology because it's available, and without a strategic approach, will not solve problems. By channelling its power through a human-centred lens, we can craft intuitive and seamless experiences to unlock its true potential for improving the human experience.
Customer experience (CX) strategy teaches us that gathering qualitative and quantitative data about our customers' needs, whether met, unmet, or predicted, enables us to be more proactive and smart in tailoring services and experiences. This approach eliminates guesswork and fosters data-driven decision-making. If we can centrally visualise this data for both patients and HCPs, a clearer picture emerges, paving the way for harmony in care delivery. This could lead to exceeding patient expectations and empowering HCPs to focus on empathetic, insightful care, ultimately transforming how care is perceived and delivered.
In the Middle East, we have an exciting opportunity to reimagine the patient experience and lead the way in improving health outcomes. By leveraging AI and adopting lessons from other sectors, we can create concierge-level patient-clinician interactions, fostering empathy, compassion, and support, and ultimately achieving better health outcomes.
In my next post I will look deeper into the ‘how’ of turning this theory into practice, by exploring our concept of the ‘human experience factory’.
