Today on the couch we have Alan Forbes with us, the CEO of The Patient Experience group.

Alan has recently written a book called ‘The Patient Experience: The Future of the Healthcare Industry’. We’re really happy to have him on the couch today!

Alan has been working on the Patient Experience throughout his career, with both clients and partners. Originally he began from an operations and engineer perspective, by helping them to optimise and strategise the ways which they worked.

The biggest impact Alan has found throughout his career has been in healthcare and medicine, where he feels he has the ability to positively improve the lives of more people at once. This is the reason Alan wrote his book back in 2019. It has been out now for nearly two years, and during the last twelve months, interest in The Patient Experience Group has grown exponentially due to the global nature of desire to maintain patient experience as a core value.

Alan’s book covers a lot of ground with patient experience, but let’s explore the digital patience experience.

Many people have had to experience the digital services available from healthcare businesses and organisations, such as Telehealth. But this is by no means the only kind of digital experience within healthcare.

Digital healthcare services are on the rise, with more improvements and developments being made. There are a lot of really interesting initiatives that organisations are looking to implement to improve patient experiences, such as contactless patient check ins in both clinics and hospitals. As well as back office systems that allow more seamless care of patient information and data when patients interact with the organisation.

What ties these digital products together is the strategy around implementation, whether this be improvements or redevelopments, brand new products are improving back end systems.

It's very important to get right, as the wrong decisions can have a really negative impact on patients when they are already feeling vulnerable, as well as the staff who have to use these digital products.

Patient data needs to be handled with a great amount of care. Governing bodies want to retain control of that data. But is this the right strategy?

Alan thinks this is a really interesting question that pops up all the time. Large healthcare organisations from around the world have seen cyber security threats pop up all the time.

Data privacy is vitally important to get right across every sector, it is however of particular importance within healthcare. We’re talking about our most personal information, what illnesses we have, our medications, our past ailments. Every person has this kind of sensitive data that needs to be cared for by both independent clinics all the way through to government run health care providers and even private medical research labs.

Ensuring there is adequate security and the digital implementation of these security measures is right is a huge priority for anyone in the healthcare industry.

Often healthcare organisations and providers reach out to Patient Experience with a need, such as a desire to improve the quality of their care or they have had a problem that really needs to be addressed. When engaging with such organisations it’s either proactive, pre-emptive or there has been an incident or emergency that requires it.

Patient Experience Group work to ensure that they fully understand the real root cause of why there has been a patient experience failure. This allows the Patient Experience Group to help the organisation put the patient back into the centre of their operation, and secure the future of delivering consistently high quality care. The relationships with clients can span from 3 months up to 3 years.

Having a ‘customer centric’ approach can be jarring for organisations who are more focused on reducing cost or increasing profit. Often this can be where conversations with clients may start. Healthcare organisations have a statement, or mandate that talks about finding the balance between patient care and the organisation.

You can purchase a copy of Alan’s book at https://thepatientexperiencebook.com.au/ and if you are a senior healthcare executive looking to do some transformation, you can give us your information and a physical copy will be sent to you.

Want to find out more? Get in touch!