At the Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital outside Detroit, patients arrive to uniformed valets and professional greeters. Wi-Fi is free and patient meals are served on demand 24 hours a day. Members of the spa staff give in-room massages and other treatments.
While clinical care is the focus of any medical Centre, hospitals have many incentives to move toward hotel-inspired features, services and staff training. Medical researchers say such amenities can improve health outcomes by reducing stress and anxiety among patients, while private rooms can cut down on the transfer of disease.
But a big driver of the trend may be hospitals’ interest in marketing — attracting patients with private insurance who have a choice in where they receive care, and encouraging word of mouth recommendations.
“It’s a way for hospitals to compete with each other,” said Zig Wu, a senior programme manager at Stanford Health Care and one of the authors of an article on hospitality in the medical field for the Journal of Healthcare Management.
Competing on the amenities is all the more important, Wu said, because there is so little reliable comparative data on hospitals’ medical outcomes. In the absence of hard data on cancer treatment or surgery success, he said, “patients look to the quality of the hospital’s environment.”
But hospital executives contend that the atmospherics have a medical purpose, too. Robert G. Riney, chief operating officer of the Henry Ford Health System, said the hospitality features help patients feel a little more control over their environment and “focus on getting better”.
He cited the introduction, in 2009, of 24-hour room service at Henry Ford West Bloomfield instead of set meal schedules.
“If someone is feeling poorly after a tough procedure or taking some medication, they aren’t going to eat just because it’s mealtime,” Riney said. “They won’t get the nutrition they need.” If patients can order what they want, when they want it, he said, “it’s much better for their recovery.”
Similarly, patients at the more than 50 Henry Ford Medical outpatient centers in the region can choose the time and location of many tests, procedures and appointments using an online system modelled on airline reservation portals. When it was introduced in 2014, cancellation and no-show rates dropped immediately, Riney said.
“We asked patients to choose when would be convenient for them to come,” he said, “rather than telling them the appointment time we have for them.”
The hospitality approach has been a primary feature outside the US at clinical centers that use hotel-like services to attract “medical tourists” to countries offering procedures like LASIK eye surgery at lower prices than back home. (Even if, as critics have noted, the hotels pamper their foreign clientele with levels of service that many local patients cannot afford.) Wu, who worked previously in the Singapore Ministry of Health, said hospitals catering to foreign patients want them to feel like they are on vacation at a spa. Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok, for example, offers luxurious accommodations, chauffeured airport pickups and visa extension services. The hospital’s website notes said the medical Centre had served more than 500,000 international patients.
At Henry Ford West Bloomfield, scores from federally mandated surveys show that the evolving features at the hospital have helped to improve its customer satisfaction ratings and make patients more likely to recommend the hospital to others. Length of stay and readmission rates have also decreased, which allows more beds to open up and the hospital to treat more patients.
Those kinds of changes can make a significant impact on a hospital balance sheet in both decreased costs and increased revenue, said Alan Lee, vice-president of operations at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, who previously worked in the hotel industry.
Indeed, a study by Deloitte found that hospitals with higher patient experience ratings were generally more profitable than those with lower scores.
In new construction, hospitals are able to adopt even more of the design features of hotels. Some are being created with curved hallway walls and sound-absorbing materials to reduce noise, cupboards in patient rooms where instruments can be tucked out of sight and gathering spaces designed to feel more welcoming and less clinical.
Of course, all these new features and services come with a price tag — part of which is billed directly to patients. Charges for optional extras like VIP rooms or spa services will generally be paid out of pocket.
And the money to offer things like the $1 million hydroponic greenhouse and education Centre at Henry Ford West Bloomfield, or the paintings and sculpture, some very expensive, at NewYork-Presbyterian, typically comes from outside donors.
“New amenities that increase the operating expenses of a hospital have little to do with insurance billing,” which is based on procedures and diagnoses, Lee said. “We absolutely rely on donor and grant funding.”
Staff training initiatives are also emulating the hotel model, empowering employees to solve patient issues, even those that are outside their purview.
A hospital patient arriving for a specific medical issue needs to have attention to all parts of mind and body to reduce stress and improve outcomes, said Rohit Verma, executive director of Cornell University’s Institute for Healthy Futures. This is akin to a hotel staff’s being aware that all aspects of a traveller’s stay — decor, cleanliness and quiet, as well as guests’ interactions with employees — are crucial to success.
At Stanford Health Care a programme called C-I-Care — which stands for Connect, Introduce, Communicate, Ask, Respond and Exit — trains all staff members to help patients any way they can. Along with their regular work duties, all hospital employees are required to spend time walking around and talking to patients or colleagues about their experiences to seek ways to improve the experience.
“Hospitals want to create a loyal customer base,” Lee said. “It’s not that we want to see our patients back here, but we do want them to recommend us to their friends and families based on the experience they had with us.”
Not all the new services are expensive. Brooke Hollis, an associate director of Cornell’s Sloan Program in Health Administration, noted that hospitals also look for “low-cost, high-impact ideas” like the University of Rochester’s Strong Memorial Hospital amenity kits with eye masks and ear plugs for patients in semi-private rooms.
The growth of on-site stores, spas and gathering places can attract more patients to a hospital. But meeting the medical needs of those additional patients can require more procedure and operating rooms, for which there may no longer be sufficient space.
“While clinical excellence is paramount, hospitality design elements are important to prioritise,” Wu said, “even as clinical demand grows in a space-constrained environment.”
The hospital he said, must find the balance.
New York Times News Service
