Episode 535

EP535: When Patient Experience Means Parking and Pianos, Plan Sponsors Pay for Hotels, Not Outcomes—What to Measure Instead, With Robyn Leone

Episode Description

On episode 532 a few weeks ago, Chris Klomp from HHS was talking about ER (emergency room) usage as a signal, not just a statistic.

If too many folks show up in the ER, consider this a signal that there's something missing. It means a patient who doesn't have access to primary care, or maybe specialist care, or maybe doesn't know where to go to get the care or is too sick to figure this out. Or maybe there's onerous prior auth requirements or long delays that you can avoid if you just go to the ER and/or a clinical organization is requiring up-front payment that a patient doesn't have on hand to make an appointment. Right?

For a full transcript of this episode, click here.

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All of these things are things that are blazing red flags that patients, who are also members, are lost.

If you consider a lost patient as a patient having a wildly poor patient experience, then it becomes, I don't know, kind of inarguable that true patient experience in healthcare is not, like, a superficial amenity such as pianos in the lobby or espresso machines.

Patient experience is, instead, a direct operational consequence of the architecture underpinning any given patient journey—or lack of architecture underpinning any given patient journey, as the case may be.

And, by the way, the irony of talking right now about underlying architecture for the patient journey being the solve for what patient experience really should be … yeah, this irony is not lost on me.

We currently have a healthcare industry slightly obsessed with architecture, but I'm talking the real estate kind with lots of marble and waterfalls and fancy art, of course.

But yeah, instead of the real estate kind of architecture, in the show today, we concern ourselves with making sure that our patient's journey is architected, that there's true design thinking here for what we want our patient experiences to be and/or member experiences to be, because same thing.

Unequivocally, without this kind of architecture, the kind that holds together a solid patient journey, we're not going to get patients (ie, members) the right diagnosis and the right treatment for that diagnosis; and we probably also won't get outcomes at an affordable price. We're just not for all the reasons that we talk about endlessly in episode after episode on this podcast.

Listen to the episodes with Preston Alexander (EP482); Vivian Ho, PhD (EP466); Shane Cerone and Sam Flanders, MD (EP492); or go back and listen to the first episode with Suhas Gondi, MD, MBA (EP404) for maybe places to start.

I say all this to say or, more accurately, for Robyn Leone to say coming up here, if we are talking about patient experience, this right here—getting the right diagnosis, right care, affordable price—is what the measure of patient experience really should be. I mean, otherwise, what are we even doing here? It's supposed to be a healthcare industry.

But in many respects, we often measure experience in ways that don't include how easy and affordable it is to walk out having been appropriately cared for.

Bottom line and key takeaway from this conversation with my guest, Robyn Leone, today: Patient experience is a function of experience architecture. Good intentions, clinician empathy, and customer service cannot overcome a bad structural design.

And I say that in defense of clinicians as much as on behalf of patients and plan sponsors. True experience means organizational leadership getting architecture right to enable the right diagnosis and the right treatment at a fair and affordable price. And plan sponsors, you get what you pay for intentionally or otherwise. So, yeah.

Robyn Leone talks about architecting the patient journey as building three buildings, metaphorical buildings now, that we should be constructing so that patients can make it through their encounters with the healthcare industry having received the highest-value-possible care as the default.

The three buildings in your member and/or patient experience journey should be building one, access and navigation. So, this is what happens prior to anybody needing care. That's the first building.

The second building houses delivery and care coordination. So, this is what happens during the care episodes. How well is the whole person treated?

And then the third building is what happens after, where there should be transparent and accountable billing.

And right, a lot of this will only work if a provider is working with plan sponsors who get in there and probably have direct contracts, who are deliberately paying for the patient experience that the plan sponsor wants their members to receive, and is actively involved in steering and tiering. And also, with an underline, is investing, I would say, in true measurable, accountable, advanced primary care.

Robyn Leone, my guest today, is the chief experience officer over at ZERO.health. This entails looking after ZERO's three main customer bases, meaning the patient/member, the employer, as well as the clinicians or provider organization.

So, therefore, she's the perfect person to have this illuminating, light-filled, open floor plan conversation with today.

This is Relentless Health Value. Thank you so much to ZERO.health for providing some financial support to Relentless Health Value to cover the cost of producing the episode today. Also, thanks so much to our founding sponsor, Aventria Health Group.

Also mentioned in this episode are ZERO.health; Preston Alexander; Vivian Ho, PhD; Shane Cerone; Sam Flanders, MD; Suhas Gondi, MD, MBA; Aventria Health Group; Cristin Dickerson, MD; Green Imaging; Andrew Tsang; Ivana Krajcinovic, PhD; John Quinn; and Stanley Schwartz, MD.

For a list of healthcare industry acronyms and terms that may be unfamiliar to you, click here.

You can learn more at ZERO.health and by following Robyn on LinkedIn.

Robyn Leone is the chief experience officer at ZERO.health, where she leads the Customer Experience teams across members, providers, employers, and brand experience. Under her leadership, the team is guided by a simple but ambitious standard: every interaction a customer has with ZERO.health should be exceptional, build trust, and leave a lasting positive impression, all in service of ZERO.health's vision of Healthcare Simplified to $0.

Over a 30-year career, Robyn has tackled some of healthcare's most complex problems, from working inside insurance companies to consulting for health systems and providers to building consumer-facing health service products. Across every role, her throughline has been the same: making the healthcare system a little easier for people to navigate.

00:00 Introduction to this episode.

00:01 EP532 with Chris Klomp.

02:51 EP482 with Preston Alexander.

02:54 EP466 with Vivian Ho, PhD.

02:55 EP492 with Sam Flanders, MD, and Shane Cerone.

02:57 EP404 with Suhas Gondi, MD, MBA.

03:10 What the measure of patient experience should be.

04:19 A summary of today's discussion.

06:24 The conversation with Robyn Leone.

07:23 The danger in focusing on atmospheric improvements in regard to the patient experience.

09:38 How to think about measuring health outcomes in regard to the patient experience.

10:57 The three parties that need to be aligned.