The Northwestern Memorial Hospital is fundamentally focused on ensuring that it gives the best services to customers. To achieve such a purpose, the facility has a well-designed customer experience model used in the collection of feedback from patients. First, patients who visit the hospital are asked to give their views concerning the quality of care they have received from caregivers. Second, the hospital’s website runs a special section on its menu dedicated to customer satisfaction through collection of feedback after serving them. The management of the hospital then uses the collected feedback to improve the manner in which its staff handles customers (North Western Memorial Hospital, 2015). For instance, the hospital trains its staff on the essentials of proper communication with the patients because it fees it is one of the fundamentals of creating a positive organizational image. The hospital uses other motivational tools such as rewarding nurses who show the highest levels of dedication to improvement of patient experience and improving the hospital’s image. Therefore, patient experience is a fundamental part of the hospital’s culture.
How the Patient Experience Model Works
The adopted model at the hospital helps the management to collect as much information as possible from customers already served, which it then uses to formulate policies that help in transforming existent approaches. Such a method is effective and is utilized in two ways. First, the hospital uses fetched data to develop a customer experience syllabus for its teaching department because it runs a teaching facility for the School of Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg (North Western Memorial Hospital, 2015). Through such a program, the hospital generates innovative approaches that help in redefining customer experience. The second way in which the adopted customer experience model of the hospital benefits the hospital is its improvement of communication skill among medical practitioners at the hospital. The model relies heavily on the existence of vibrant communicators, which the hospital has since undertaken to train its staff for effective management of such issues.
Customer Experience Model in the Nursing Unit
The nursing model plays a role in customer satisfaction because the hospital grants it the responsibility of caring for patients. Therefore, the unit’s customer experience model echoes that of the hospital, but takes a slightly different approach. In this case, nurses help the hospital to discuss reimbursement and its relationship with the quality of care given. Therefore, the model seeks to give the best quality services to patients through coordination of the nursing manager who ensures that all nurses adhere to the set standards of professionalism and ethics (North Western Memorial Hospital, 2015)..
Measuring Customer Satisfaction at the Nursing Unit
The nursing unit evaluates levels of customer satisfaction through generation of feedback at the points of service and using the same data to assess its performance on a weekly basis. If customer satisfaction is high, the management of the unit asks nurses to keep using the adopted strategies (North Western Memorial Hospital, 2015). However, if the feedback is negative, the department reviews the approaches it has been using and discusses other viable approaches.
Customer Satisfaction and Reimbursement
Reimbursement relates to the charges that patients pay for healthcare services. It is related with patient satisfaction because it generates an impression that hospitals give value for the money, which patients pay. Therefore, the nurses have the duty of ensuring they make customers satisfied enough so that they can have the willingness to pay (Goetz, Janney & Ramsey, 2010).
References
Goetz, K., Janney, M., & Ramsey, K. (2010). When nursing takes ownership of financial outcomes: achieving exceptional financial performance through leadership, strategy, and execution. Nursing economics, 29(4), 173-182.
North Western Memorial Hospital (NWMH). (2015). Exceptional Care. Web.