How health care can fix its customer satisfaction problem

Health care ultimately must be about customer care. For a business that saves lives every day, health care gets low marks for customer satisfaction. The latest net promoter scores give the healthcare industry a rating of 38 out of 100. That puts the business behind Apple, Chick-fil-a, Netflix, and Starbucks, but ahead of Exxon Mobil, Time Warner Cable, and Waste Management. The problem is the vast uncaring and inefficient bureaucracy that has been built up around the medical field. And I’m convinced there’s one main reason why being a customer of that medical bureaucracy is such a lousy experience – the economic incentives of our business are backwards. Instead of rewarding health, we pay for sickness. Our fee-for-service healthcare system is set up to compensate businesses for churning out as many tests and procedures as quickly as possible. Heads in beds – that, unfortunately, has become the fundamental economic model of so many modern hospitals and healthcare facilities.