Revisit: The Experience Economy | With Scott Regan - Part 1

We're revisiting some of our earlier episodes because the patient experience remains a hot topic in healthcare, with many experts calling for a greater emphasis on patient-centered care. 

In this episode, after the headlines with Aaron Higgins & Jason Crosby, our guest Scott Regan provides insights on the experience economy and its impact on healthcare are especially relevant in this context. As the industry continues to evolve, it's crucial to explore innovative approaches that prioritize the patient experience. In this interview, Scott offers valuable perspectives and strategies for healthcare leaders looking to improve the patient experience. We hope this episode inspires our listeners to think creatively about how to enhance the quality of care they provide.

Learn more about LeadWorks on their website

Scott Regan can be found on LinkedIn. 

Transcript available on our website

Credits
Production Assistance & Editing: Nyla Wiebe
Scripting by: Aaron Higgins
Show Notes: Aaron Higgins
Transcripts: Jason Crosby
Social Media Management: Jeremy Miller & Nyla Wiebe
Co-Hosts: Aaron Higgins & Jason Crosby
Show Producers: Mike Scribner & John Crew
Guest host: Mike Scribner

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Production © Strategic Healthcare Partners, LLC.
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Transcript

Aaron: 0:48

Welcome to Beyond the Stethoscope, vital Conversations with SHP. I'm Aaron Higgins. On today's episode in the news segment, Jason Crosby gives us some timely information about the Health and Human Services Information Blocking Requirement and some of the efforts organizations are trying to delay it further, and I talk about how cybersecurity attacks have led to some expensive costs for some organizations that could have been avoided. And then Jason and Mike Scribner sit down in an interview with our guest today, Scott Regan, the CEO of Leadworks, and how the experience economy is chaining the way health care organizations compete and provide health care. Let's get going with the news.

Jason: 1:40

Jason Crosby with Strategic Health Care Partners with our news episode, and I'm joined by Aaron Higgins. Hey Aaron, how are you today? I'm doing pretty good, Jason. How about you? I'm doing just great.

Jason: 1:52

Well, let's jump right into it. Lots of news. Let me start us off with something that's pretty time sensitive and that being around the information blocking rules that came out as part of the Cures Act about 18 months ago or so. As of April of last year, providers, vendors, etc. had to provide information accessible to patients. Fast forward today's an expansion of that scope of data to where, basically, you and I, as patients, can access our full PHI sort of record and, if not, there were fines that were being considered on behalf of the providers. Now, medical associations, as of about a week or two ago, did send HHS secretary letters asking for a year along expansion of that deadline. As of today, nothing has come back, but this is a pretty monumental sort of milestone in terms of information sharing and accessibility to our information as patients that everyone should be aware of. What are you aware of that providers can maybe tap into as far as their experience there?

Aaron: 3:07

Well, definitely clinicians can tap into. If they've been a part of QPP, which is the quality payment program, information blocking has been a key cornerstone of the whole program. So if providers are listening to this and they're going well, hey, how does this affect a practice? It already has affected you. It's affected you for the last five, six years with MIPS and the other elements of QPP, so that shouldn't be anything new. But I guess more strongly to me is that information sharing has been a part of HIPAA, which has passed in 1996. We're coming up here in just a few years of the 30th anniversary of the passage of HIPAA. So I'm kind of surprised that these organizations are pushing back like this. This really should be a fairly common thing by now and I'm surprised to hear that anyone feels like it shouldn't be or that they need more time. They've had 25 plus years to be ready for this.

Jason: 4:11

Yeah, not just that. These fines that are being discussed are pretty heavy, and this is something that affects us all, whether we're on the provider side or as a patient right. So, to our providers out there listening, call your EMR vendor, call your HIE. If you're unaware of your information that's being distributed, check into it, because it's certainly worth the time. So what do you all have on your end there, Aaron?

Aaron: 4:34

Well, kind of staying in the same vein as IT and EMRs, a few weeks ago, there was a lawsuit that was filed against a Mon Health out of West Virginia, and back in December of 2021, they had a data breach. About a half million records just shy of that were were affected, and we're talking the entire record, not just you'll hear about it. It was just data bursts and names and things like that. In this case, it's the entire record. And if you're thinking well, this sort of thing happens all the time. Why is this a part of the news segment?

Aaron: 5:11

Well, fast forward to just a couple days ago and LifeBridge Health, which is a Baltimore based healthcare organization, had a very similar breach back in 2018. Just about a half million records. Everything was stolen. They too were sued and they just reached a agreement to pay out $9.5 million, plus about a million dollars in cybersecurity improvements. So why I'm highlighting this is, first off, mon Health is probably in a whole lot of trouble in terms of this lawsuit and its outcome, but how much money LifeBridge is going to have to pay out in terms of their insurance payouts, but also them as an organization trying to fix after the fact? Too little, too late? It seems like this definitely one of those cases where an ounce of prevention could have been worth a pound of cure by no adjacent on the hospital side. What's your perspective on this, and what do you think our listeners should know about?

Jason: 6:10

Yeah, the last couple of years and this applies actually to the practice side as well, as we've been helping out the providers on insurance applications and what we've seen over the last couple of years and this goes to the Midwest, the Southeast it doesn't matter we're seeing over a 30% increase on cyber insurance premiums and that trend's only going to increase with more incidences, as you're saying here, right, and we just saw two days ago, common Spirit, one of the two largest nonprofit chains in the country, have a similar cyber attack. Systems went down, appointments were canceled, things of that nature. So it's going to hit your bottom line as well.

Aaron: 6:47

Yeah, I saw another system is also under attack today. They just took their systems offline. It's a really scary time for healthcare organizations. It's time that you need to up your budget yesterday. If your IT department is saying, hey, we need this, listen to them. We have a little bias to give them my background, but it's definitely something that we need to be taking seriously Already. I know we are right up on time for our news segment. Jason, tell us what's coming up in the interview.

Jason: 7:17

Yeah, excited here to have Scott Regan. Scott is founder of LeadWorks. He's also had numerous leadership positions in different healthcare settings, global consulting groups, strategic planning software. He's an adjunct professor. He's kind of been there, done that. But we have a really good conversation, two-part conversation around the experience economy and so if you're looking to help brand your practice or hospital patient engagement, or even SEO, if you want to find out what that is, it's going to be a very informative conversation. So really glad to have Scott Regan with us.

Aaron: 7:53

Already, folks. I think that brings us to the end of the segment. You all have a great one. We'll see you at our next episode. Great Thanks, everybody.

Jason: 8:06

Today we are joined by Scott Regan. Scott, thanks for joining us today and welcome to the podcast. I'm happy to be here Today. We're going to discuss a concept folks may recognize, going back what maybe the late 90s and rough other industries, and that's around the experience economy. Healthcare is certainly a different place, like many industries today, and engaging consumers even more challenging. So let's just start there, scott Tell us what exactly is the experience economy?

Scott: 8:36

The best way to describe the experience economy is by telling it how we've evolved from an agrarian society to now. This is like the fourth stage of the economy, by using a birthday cake as an illustration. And years ago, when we were in an agrarian society, our moms would make birthday cakes from scratch. We'd get the wheat, the sugar, the flour and it cost next to nothing to make the birthday cake. We moved into the industrial economy and we paid Betty Crocker to have a box mix Cost us more but there was convenience to it. And then we moved into the service economy in which we ordered cakes from the store. We'd go to the Publix or the Haris Teter, order a birthday cake, bring it home for our kids.

Scott: 9:21

Now we've moved into that experience economy where we don't even have time to go pick up the cake from the store. We just outsourced the entire birthday party to a company that specializes in them. They bring in the cake, they bring in the air castles setting up in the backyard, all the kids come over and now we have an experience. And so that's really what we're talking about with the experience economy is how do we take the goods and services that we currently offer and turn them into experiences and leading edge companies. I believe we'll find out very shortly that the next competitive battleground lies in staging experiences for consumers.

Jason: 10:01

So, would you believe, is the experience coming more about things like theme parks and movie theaters than it is about health.

Scott: 10:08

It would seem that would be the case, but really isn't. So you know this is going to date me, but back in 1982, there's a TV show called Taxi. Now, mike, you probably remember the show. It was only on for a couple of years, but there's a taxi driver featured a taxi driver named Iggy. And Iggy is a New York City taxi driver who decided that he was going to go beyond just moving people from point A to point B and he started serving sandwiches and drinks. He started conducting tours, he sang Frank Sinatra to people while he was driving and he created this very unique experience that people decided that they really wanted to get a ride from Iggy, and in the show a lot of people would actually tell Iggy to drive around the block one more time and they'd give him big tips. He understood way back in 1982, if he wanted to separate himself out from being a taxi driver and most people don't think taxi drivers have much of an experience that he had to do something different and create that unique experience.

Scott: 11:10

I've been in Uber vehicles in which the first thing they do is they offer you a bottle of water. They're trying to create an experience for you to separate themselves apart and to get a higher five stars because I had a bottle of water, versus a guy who didn't give me the bottle of water. Yet the experience can be in anything. It's truly. How do we connect people in a way that's meaningful to them, to create a better experience for the things that they're consuming every day?

Scribner: 11:39

anyway, scott, break that down a little bit for me. What are the characteristics of an experience that you're talking about? Make it a little more concrete for folks.

Scott: 11:47

Yeah, there's two parts of this Mike. There's to an experience, there's passive participation, and in healthcare we have a lot of that. If you're coming into the orthopedic office or the plastic surgeon or the hospital, you're coming in there for an appointment. You may have surgery scheduled. That's more of a passive experience. You're waiting for other people to do the things to provide the services to you that you're purchasing. Yeah, you're engaged in it. Obviously, you're going to have a knee replacement or you're going to have a botox injection, whatever it might be, but it's still to some degree, a passive experience. The other piece, the other characteristic, is that we need to find the connection that unites them with that passive experience. So what can we do to create something that really elevates the experience, rather than just sitting in a waiting room and waiting for your name to be called so you can go back and be prepped?

Scott: 12:42

Years ago, I went down to Celebration Health down in Orlando and they had it already figured out. So this was the hospital, the model hospital of the future. When you went back into the MRI, you walked down this hallway that was designed to look like a boardwalk and they had cabanas coming out from the side of the wall. You go back into and there's a little sand on the side, but the floor was actually a boardwalk. You went back into the MRI room and there's beach noises going on. They lay you down on the MRI and the lights above you has the plexiglass cover in front of the lights in the ceiling and it was painted with skyscrapes and so everything around it was designed to make you feel like you were at the beach. It was an event. It completely changed the game for people and patient satisfaction scores. They were through the roof because they understood that, yeah, people are coming here for an MRI, but how do we turn that MRI into an experience? We're seeing this with airlines today. We're seeing this.

Scott: 13:46

Western Hotels recently decided people come here and they say at our hotels, a lot of them want to work out, but they forgot their gym clothes. They didn't bring sneakers. Western started giving people, loading people complete workout outfits. They would say come in here, we have a closet full of stuff, get what you need so you can go work out. That's connecting people. They had gyms that people weren't using and they had people in the hotel who didn't have workout clothes, and so they decided to create a better experience by connecting people who were passively using the hotel and engaging them in their gyms. Cadbury Chocolate recently, not too long ago, decided to create spas based on new flavors of chocolate and they offered these spa experiences for free, and it was only for a couple of days and when you missed it people were like, oh my God, you should have been there, and a spa that was based on this new chocolate flavor is unbelievable. That's getting creative and understanding a little bit about how to create an experience out of something that is just really more of a commodity.

Scott: 14:47

Do you remember in 1981, 1982, somewhere around there, the movie with Michael J Fox, Doc Hollywood? Again, I'm dating myself. Michael J Fox is a plastic surgeon who was in Hollywood and decides to come to this little southern town and sit up shop Now in Hollywood. When you saw his, when you went into the lobby of his plastic surgery practice, they had live dancers that were shadowed, that were behind a screen in the lobby and all you could see was their silhouettes and they were slowly just moving their bodies and posing to provide these wonderful images of the human form.

Scott: 15:24

Can plastic surgeons do that today? Probably not, but there's a lot of things that plastic surgeons can do to make the experience different than just somebody sitting in there waiting for their name to be called and it's not just plastic surgeons like we've all been to the doctor's office in which you're waiting in a really frummy lobby for somebody to open the door and call out your name and bring you back. And is that the experience that we're going to go back and tell all of our friends and family about and refer other patients to? Probably not, you have examples of that?

Scribner: 15:56

Scott, typical practice that we interact with tends to be a fairly small practice, can be in a rural area. Do you have examples of what people have done to improve that experience, or the waiting or the flow itself?

Scott: 16:09

To create an experience isn't always free. Sometimes the experience is just really great customer service training but I've known physician practices do. They stock their fridge with water and soft drinks and little snacks and they offer them when people come in, because they know they're backed up or they're offered something. Hey, can I get you a Coca-Cola or can I get you some crackers? Little things like that make a big difference. It says you mean more to us than just a patient on a chart. We want to make your experience as comfortable as possible and sometimes it's just the aesthetics around you. How can you change the aesthetic environment to make it a little bit more immersive? Now I saw some in. A lot of this is enabling technology. I was talking to a fritto recently. There's new technology that you can have that they can put artificial intelligence in the wallpaper so that if somebody actually holds up there or they stand the wall, they see images that are on there and surprisingly, it's not that. There's things like that that you can that. If you think hard enough, you can say how can I make the, especially the wait time? How can I make that wait time a little bit better?

Scott: 17:25

I'm sure you've walked into large practices and it looks like a gray on bus station. It feels like a gray on bus station and I've been in those and that's the last experience that people won't want. And the question is who do we need to build this for? I've emptied a survey recently. They did a study and they found that 78% of millennials are willing to pay more money for a better experience, even if what they're buying is the same. The experience is different, but the actual service or the product they're buying is the same. They want the experience. And so those millennials that's the next generation coming up. If we don't start preparing them to embrace the millennials who really want to feel like they're being tatered to, then we're going to lose those to the folks who figure it out.

Scribner: 18:08

How do those practices solicit that kind of feedback? How do you know whether or not your experience is memorable and driving that level of satisfaction?

Scott: 18:17

Unfortunately, most of our patients that have a factor in service don't get at the experience. It gets up the basic things like wait times and was the staff nice to me and did they, were they attentive and did they listen, and all those are important to the experience, but doesn't really talk about hey, was your overall experience from the time you walked in, the time you left and even in between? How did it make you feel? So I think we got to start by asking different questions on our patient satisfaction surveys to better understand what people want. Now, and the other thing is really just asking, and a lot of times, if I'm a doctor and I have a sole practice, or even if I'm a big practice, I need to figure out what do my patients want from me? That would make this experience so much better for them.

Scott: 19:03

Just here's an easy one hey, if you're running more than half an hour behind, is it possible to pick up the phone and call the patient and say we're running about 30 minutes behind. If you want to come in later, don't come in now. You have an appointment at two o'clock and we're already it's 1030. We're half an hour behind, so I don't want you here waiting around. So it's knowing that there's an extra level of customer service that's easy to deploy.

Scott: 19:28

Yet how many of us think about actually calling patients to let them know that we're an hour or two hours behind? Yet we go in and then we're told the doctors two hours behind today and you have a three o'clock appointment and you see him at five five 30. And had you known that, you probably would have rescheduled. Sometimes it's we're not asking the right questions all the time and if we really want to understand the experience that our patients want, we have to ask them about the experiences to begin with. And patients and as factions are raised, aren't. So no for that and for, honestly, I actually believe that a lot of physicians, a lot of administrators, don't want the answers to those questions because they're not going to let that hear.

Jason: 20:04

Scott, the coming off the pandemic, everybody shutting down and now patients are finally going back into their practice or hospital and you've had the uptick and telehealth, remote patient monitoring, and I'm going to guess that all of us are probably wearing a wearable device now. So do you think, at this point in time, where health care is going in terms of consumer engagement, that's going to help, where what you're talking to us about today, in terms of the experience economy, is that a plus that you see?

Scott: 20:35

I think it's already impacting health care Jason, especially some of the things that you just mentioned for the apps that you have. I generally, but I'm not feeling well. I pull out my phone and I talked to a doctor from my insurance company in 15 minutes and he's diagnosing me and prescribing me and he's giving me an experience. My home is. That's great. I don't have to leave the house. I don't want to go see my doctor because I got to go in the car and I got to drive 45 minutes and then, because I don't have an appointment, they're going to have to fit me in. It's going to be two to three hour wait and I'm paying a copay that I'm not paying with the telemedicine app. So the insurance companies are already they've already farthest technology to figure out how to provide a better experience and a lower price point. That helps them because it costs them less for me to see the telemedicine doc than it does to see my real doc and it's better for me because I never have to leave the house and I get to see him, like in 15 minutes. I'm in the queue and they're there. So we're going to be doubled up by all the technology that's coming down the road that's allowing others to circumvent the patient physician relationship, which makes us more of a strategic imperative. If we don't improve the experience for our patients, they're going to find an alternative solution and it may be another doctor who has a better experience for the doctor who you know. And this is why a lot of people are paying money for concierge medicine. What are they really paying for? If you're paying $1,500 a year to see your doctor whenever you want, you're paying for the better experience. People are willing to pay $1,500 for a concierge medicine experience rather than not paying it and sitting in that waiting room for a couple of hours for an appointment time that you made six weeks ago and you're still having to wait a couple of hours. So this is all under foot and we can. If I'm a physician, I can turn my head the other way and pretend it's not going to happen, but it's already happening. It's already happening. Unfortunately, the typical doctor, especially primary care, doesn't know how many patient visits he or she is losing to the telemedicine apps. They have no idea. They may see volume going down. It's okay, we can believe it on COVID, but I'll tell you what it's. I don't. I think we're naive if we're going to blame it on COVID.

Scott: 22:54

If we looked at this a different way and we said what if we charged admission? What if we were a theme park you talked about? Theme parks are a little Jason. Theme parks charge admission, so they know people are paying. You're going to Disney, you're dropping a hundred and fifty bucks a person for that one day Pass and you're bringing your family. Disney knows we got to give these people an experience that's worthy of that price tag.

Scott: 23:15

If I'm a physician and I looked at it that way, what if I charge my patients an admission charge to come see me, had to pay it advance and it's a $25 ticket? How would that reframe this? How would you rethink your whole business model? And to some degree, they are paying it an admission fee. It's the copay. They're paying 35 bucks To come see you. Yet we don't look at it that way. No, I'm paying that regardless of what you prescribed for me, what I, what happens that visit? If you know I'm paying that 35 bucks, it better be well worth my 35 bucks to come see you. So we need it. We really need to rethink how we're practicing medicine by flipping this around and saying, yeah, we're not just providing a service, but we have to provide a service in such a way that it makes for a much better experience for our patients.

Scribner: 24:09

Step back. If I was a practice administrator or a physician hearing this, I would probably saying yes, I agree with you. But it's intimidating to me to think about pivoting From what I've set up my practice to be over the last 20 years to really change and move in this direction. Help me, give me what are my first step.

Scott: 24:31

I'll tell you what you got to fix the entire process. I think my goal, if I was a practice administrator, my, my goal would be to get rid of the waiting room Now and I say that someone in, just because you're always going to have to have place to park the family members come along for the ride. But do we? You go in a place that has a giant waiting room and it's designed the moment and I've seen this, I've walked into practices they have a waiting room that could put 50 people in it. The first impression you get is I'm gonna be waiting, I'm gonna be waiting. How do we shrink that waiting room and figure out a process to get people through the front door faster and back into the exam room, even if they're waiting just as long as they exact in the exam room? But you make that a better experience. You know, the worst thing is when you go to the exam room and you're there for 45 minutes and nobody comes to check on you. You're fine, so I wonder if they forgot that I was here. Is that ever happened to you that you've actually had to walk out of the exam room and find somebody said you guys know, I've been in exam room six for an hour and nobody's come to see me. Absolutely yeah, it's happened to all of us. It's happened to all of us. So we got to got to fix our processes, got to fix how we and we got to rethink how we schedule. You almost have to start at the end of this bike and look at the people walking out and work backward. How do we improve this?

Scott: 25:49

My daughter's a PA in a very busy internal medicine office in Atlanta and they and it's all about as driving as much volume through as possible by 10 o'clock in the morning they're already an hour behind and because they're so focused on just as a cattle call and and they get away with it because they're they're part of that Emory campus. Everybody the internal medicine doctor has been there for a long time a treat primarily and they have a long roster of Medicare patients who would never go anywhere else because they've had a relationship with them for 20 years. But we're not always and we don't always have that luxury, and especially if you're a physician who has a cash business dermatologist, plastic surgeons, a lot of primary care doctors now opening medical spas, they're doing skin care products, they're doing laser body sculpting, they're doing Botox injections because they can't survive on an on a primary care model anymore that they have to find new revenue strains. If you're in any of those cash kind of businesses, for I'll tell you what. Now the experience Economy really takes hold, because you're not going to go sit in a primary care doctor or family medicine Office or an hour to get your Botox visit, sitting around with a bunch of people who are sick and been sniffling and just not feeling well, and you're sitting there because you want to get. You want to get your cool sculpting done. So we, the whole thing has to be blown up and we have to change the paradigm, especially if you're an older physician. This is really far because they weren't brought up to practice medicine this way. They were brought up to be a good doctor, not to stage an event for people coming in. The younger doctors that I've talked to, that are coming out of medical school, who are on the, there are millennials themselves. They get it and they're investing in the types of things to create a much better experience better waiting rooms, better processes, better technology, apps that track loyalty that people can they get instant notifications, they all sorts of things to improve the communication I I still have trouble with my doctor getting somebody to return.

Scott: 27:58

Oh well, I can never get my doctor on on the phone. I always goes to voicemail and then it stays before somebody actually calls me back. So, heaven forbid, it was really a life-threatening emergency. I can't rely on my doctor to give me a call back at the same day and and and. This is the world we live in. It's the world we all live in, and those are its basic things we have to fix. We're going, everybody's going to call trees, automated phone systems. Nobody ever answers the phone. That goes into a voicemail box, always checking the voicemail box. So it could be days, if anybody checks it at all, and by that time you've lost the patients going somewhere else.

Aaron: 28:39

And that concludes part one of today's interview with Scott Regan. Be sure to tune in next week for part two. You've been listening to, beyond the stethoscope, vital conversations with SHP. This has been a production of strategic healthcare partners your news hose today for Jason Crosby and me, Aaron Higgins. It is produced and edited by Nyla we've. Our social media content producers are Nyla we've and Jeremy Miller, and our executive producers are Mike Scribner and John crew. More information about SHP and the services we offer, including the back library of episodes, episode transcripts, links to resources discussed and much, much more, please visit our website at shpll. c om. Thanks for listening.