Fred Lee has a great talent for storytelling and a unique combination of first-hand experience working at both the hospital and Disney. This book compares your workflows and cultures and teaches us how to design modern interactions with hospital patients for success. It turns out that his lessons are directly applicable to our business.
Whenever the owner of a medical billing service asks me for “billing software,” he usually means software to manage what he had. I, on the other hand, wanted to understand how their service is designed and delivered and what the practice owner (their client) and the patient (their client’s client) would expect. It seems to me that if the billing service is poor, outdated, or unprofitable, we should consider redesigning it before automating it. I think the worst thing you can do with poorly delivered service is to scale it up and exacerbate an already negative customer experience by delivering it faster to more customers. This often doesn’t sit well with billing service owners who see my limited experience selling my software and see my questions about its business focus and growth, compliance, and convenience as unnecessarily intrusive.
You would think that the owner of a billing service has a much tougher customer than Disney; the risk of loss of the client is greater; The medical billing environment is much more complex with many more non-standard situations. At Disney, customers start out happy and excited rather than upset and underpaid. They stand in lines but don’t care about your insurance claims, patient referrals, or compliance. They take a trip that doubles a million times, while each new payer is a unique experience. Meanwhile, practice operations, technology, and legal costs are increasing. Disney seems like a picnic compared to the nightmare billing and practice managers face every day in a hostile payment environment over which we have very little of the kind of control we would at Disney.
Using examples from his work both at Disney and as a senior hospital executive, Fred Lee challenges the assumptions that have defined customer service in healthcare. In this unique book, discover the key similarities between Disney and hospitals: They both provide an “experience,” not just a service. It shows how any company can emulate the strategies that earn Disney the trust and loyalty of its guests and employees.
This book also shows how standard service excellence initiatives in healthcare have failed to lead to high patient satisfaction and loyalty, and defines 10 principles to help ant companies gain the competitive advantage that comes from be seen as “the best” by their own employees, consumers, and community.
This book is practical and insightful. Useful instantly.