Guest Blog: The Power of Empathy in the Healthcare Industry

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post my colleague, Dr. Thomas Lee shares a patient experience that exemplifies what it takes to provide an Amazing patient experience. Many of the components of the patient experience, including empathy and consistency, are the same for all of our customer experiences. – Shep Hyken

What can business learn from healthcare about customer service and the customer experience?

In 2008, Cleveland Clinic CEO Dr. Toby Cosgrove set out to improve the patient experience at every turn. He appointed Dr. James Merlino as chief experience officer (CXO), and they decided that the foundation of the makeover should be to inject empathy into every facet of the patient experience, just as service at every point in a customer’s stay is the key to the success of world-class hotels such as the Ritz-Carlton.

The message that the leadership at Cleveland Clinic sent to their colleagues is increasingly widespread. Technical excellence is not enough. Safety is not enough. Efficiency is not enough. Clinicians have to be reliable in every way, including delivery of care that is empathic. Excellence means consistency in delivering care the way it should be—for every patient every time.

Clinicians can improve their ability to recognize patients’ negative emotions, concerns, and inner experiences so that they can explore those issues with the patient. These key skills focus on cognition, understanding, and communicating. Training gives caregivers practice in recognizing when patients are offering an opportunity for an empathic interaction by expressing emotions or worries. The caregiver can then respond empathetically, explore the issues, and convey understanding.

Empathic care is something that happens between clinicians and patients and often with patients’ families as well. If it is more like dancing than running for clinicians, it is dancing with new partners every 15 minutes. Patients and clinicians vary in their temperaments, and the fact is that we all vary as individuals from day to day and even from hour to hour. The result is that empathic care can seem like snowflakes: when you look at relationships between clinicians and patients, no two are exactly the same.

When I talk to doctors and patients about their relationships, I am often startled at the descriptions of their interactions. “My doctor has empathy in spades,” one woman said. We’ll call her Gloria. She was referring to her primary care doctor, an internist who is well known among her colleagues for her directness, which sometimes comes off as bluntness.

We’ll call her Dr. Smith. Here is the example Gloria provided:

“Several years ago, Dr. Smith found what seemed to be a large fibroid during my annual pelvic exam. She didn’t seem too concerned but suggested I have an ultrasound. I had the test on a Friday morning a few weeks later and left that afternoon for a long weekend in New York. When I came home the following Tuesday, there was a voicemail from Dr. Smith’s office asking me to come in that afternoon. I knew immediately that the ultrasound had found something serious.

“When I got to her office I expected the usual 15-minute wait, but Dr. Smith was at the reception desk to meet me. ‘When I saw your ultrasound results, I almost threw up,’ she said as soon as we were alone. ‘It’s ovarian.’”

“And that was empathy?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Gloria said. “Because I felt like I was going to vomit, too.”

Somehow Dr. Smith sensed that this was just the thing to say to Gloria at that moment. Gloria loved Dr. Smith for saying it; she took that comment to mean that Dr. Smith completely understood what she was feeling and was going to be on and at her side every step of the difficult path ahead.

Blunt though she can be, Dr. Smith knows what empathy is: understanding what another person is feeling and conveying that understanding. Dr. Smith’s reciprocal expression of nausea was a visceral statement that she understood what Gloria was feeling. Dr. Smith also sensed how this particular patient wanted to be treated. She knew that Gloria would rather be given a direct bolus of bad news than have it spoon-fed to her in bits and pieces.

Dr. Smith has a large and diverse practice. I can’t imagine that all her patients would like hearing that their test results made her sick to her stomach. What do Dr. Smith’s other patients think of her? In fact, her ratings are superb, pretty much the equivalent of perfect SAT scores. Perhaps she attracts patients who all want care of a certain style, but it is more likely that she knows how to deliver empathic care differently for different patients.

Dr. Smith is constantly adjusting what she does for and says to her patients. What stays the same is her reliability in making the effort to tune in to the needs of the person in front of her. It’s work—draining work, in fact—to do that. It’s an art as well. And when it goes well, it is part of what makes medicine such a fabulous field in which to work.

Dr. Thomas Lee joined Press Ganey as Chief Medical Officer in 2013. As CMO, Tom is responsible for developing clinical and operational strategies to help providers across the nation measure and improve the patient experience, with an overarching goal of reducing the suffering of patients as they undergo care, and improving the value of that care. Tom frequently lectures on the patient experience and strategies for improving the value of health care and has authored more than 260 academic articles and three books, Chaos and Organization in Health Care and Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine. In November 2015, Tom released his third book, An Epidemic of Empathy in Healthcare: How to Deliver Compassionate, Connected Patient Care That Creates a Competitive Advantage, published by McGraw-Hill.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

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