Hospital care: Cue from hospitality

PK Mohan Kumar, MD & CEO, Comfort Healthcare and Tourism, explains the trend of integrating the values of the hospitality industry into hospitals to enrich patient experience, in the backdrop of rising medical tourism and India’s growing importance as a destination for medical value travel

What does it take to match up to world class standards within hospitals in India?

At a time when healthcare is seen as potential business opportunity and many domestic and international brands or either consolidating or investing into smart hospitals, among the challenges are meeting rising expectations in terms of sensitive patient care, strengthening non-medical aspects of facility and service, integral to a seamless hospital experience.

It is becoming increasingly evident that Indian doctors or medical care are comparable to the best in the world. Many of the specialists are trained overseas and have international experience in the best of hospitals and clinics in the US or Europe. Coupled with this intellectual and highly skilled assets, is the fact that India is an affordable healthcare destination as compared to the West. The success rate and the ease with which admissions are recorded (with less waiting period) is again a testimony to our potential for becoming the most attractive medical tourism destination.

However, in order to make India a sustainable healthcare destination, this new emerging sector with its huge learning curve so far as the positioning and management of brand, service deliverables have to be leveraged.

Recent trends clearly indicate an increasing awareness to identify, understand and adopt many facets of the hospital industry vis-à-vis the brand standard, managing customer expectations with a sharp focus on non-medical logistics, facility up-keep and customised service. Herein comes the challenge for the companies and leadership teams of branded hospitals on how to structure and develop a concierge team with the required competency, skill, attitude while inculcating a patient/ escort friendly work culture. Hospitals need to reposition themselves reflecting extreme sensitivity, efficiency to deliver sustainable service time and again. The patients and their families coming in contact at all the frontline touch points must experience positive moment of truth at all times.

On a broader framework, the transformation is all about focusing on experience and perception created the minds of end user from the interaction with the frontline staff. Therefore, it is extremely important and critical that the brand promise, image is always at the back of the mind of each and every associate while dealing with every query or interaction with the end user. A broad range of customer and frontline associate engagements occur during the time of reservation and the subsequent processes involving finalisation of non-medical logistics and support facilities. Subconscious evaluation and assessment goes on while the patient/ family completes all the formalities, even long before the actual arrival of the patient. Similar to a hotel, checking into a hospital also needs to be managed by a preplanned and seamless process. This could be in the case of appointment with physician/ surgeon or arrival and registration formalities. The frontline team at the hospital needs to be sensitised to handle these early arrival and settling experiences very professionally albeit a hotel reception and escort to the room.

Technology and property management software that monitors and manages every activity in a hotel be it in front of the house, heart of the house or the back of the house need to be positioned in a hospital to facilitate smooth access to medical records, faster treatment process etc. The talk line between non-medical concierge team and the patient’s family has to be streamlined process driven to ensure communication. In a hospital environment standard protocol in terms of communication be it on purely medical aspect or non-medical guideline, rules governing safety and security have to be on similar lines as how it has been done in a premium hotel.

The overall organisational culture is tuned towards providing “total care and seamless flawless care experience to the patients and their family in terms of basics (hygiene, safety, security, food etc.) as also out of the way requests and emergency situation”

One of the redeeming features of world class service is the ability of the staff to go beyond call of the duty and travel their extra mile to accommodate unexpected but doable little things that matter. Customer research clearly indicates that it is always the little things and warmth and the positive attitude of the down the line touch point staff that creates the impact and generate an everlasting affinity towards the instruction and the brand. Hospitals in India have a great opportunity to wake up to this reality and seriously look at outsourcing to specialists in the hospitality space who could come on board as specialised concierge vertical providing solid support to the medical team. In today’s time and age, business is all about focusing on your core competence and outsourcing the support services to competent specialists. At the end of the day, medical expertise and infrastructure for treatment being more or less similar given the access to knowledge and technology, it is the service and the experience that matters to differentiate brands.