In an increasingly consumer-focused health care market, patient experience is one of the biggest drivers of patients’ loyalty to a physician practice. In fact, poor service from both physicians and staff both fall into the top 10 reasons why consumers will leave a primary care practice. To meet these consumer demands, many medical groups across the country are instituting patient experience improvement initiatives.

However, progress on improving the consumer experience remains slow. Most medical groups approach patient experience from a group-wide, rather than local practice level. This makes it difficult to engage staff at local practices around the importance of improving the patient experience and can create inconsistent experiences between practices in the same group.

This research report outlines the four steps medical groups should take to empower local practice managers to own local patient experience initiatives and support their frontline staff in meeting patient demands for improved customer service:

1. Tailor level of support provided to individual practices (p. 10)
2. Overinvest in staff service training and tools (p. 14)
3. Use practice-level data to sustain improvement (p. 19)
4. Implement staff incentives based on practice performance (p. 21)

Download the Research Report