Healthcare providers' lack of emphasis on patient satisfaction can encourage people to seek treatment elsewhere or not at all, which may result in lost revenue for some hospitals and health systems, according to a report from Accenture.
Even though approximately 48 percent of hospital and health system CEOs ranked patient satisfaction among their top three priorities, healthcare providers trail other industries in customer service.
According to the report, it takes healthcare providers an average of 60 seconds to answer a patient phone call, while the cross-industry best practice was 23 seconds. In addition, it takes an average of 8.1 minutes to schedule an appointment with a healthcare provider, while the cross-industry best practice was 3.7 minutes.
The report was based on 1,000 phone calls made to 28 hospital systems in five U.S. metropolitan areas.
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