Fred Lee has a great talent for storytelling and a unique combination of first-hand experience working both at the hospital and at Disney. This book compares his workflows and cultures and teaches us how to design modern hospital patient interactions for success. It turns out that the lessons from him are directly applicable to our business.
Whenever a medical billing service owner comes to me looking for “billing software”, they are usually referring to software to manage what they had. I, on the other hand, wanted to understand how your service is designed and delivered and what the practice owner (your client) and patient (your client’s client) would expect. It seems to me that if the billing service is sub-par, outdated, or not profitable, we should consider redesigning it before automating it. I think the worst thing you can do to a poorly delivered service is amplify it and exacerbate an already negative customer experience by delivering it faster to more customers. This often doesn’t sit well with billing service owners who see my experience limited to selling my software and see my questions about their business focus and growth, compliance and convenience as unnecessarily intrusive.
You’d think the owner of a billing service would have a much tougher customer than Disney; the risk of losing customers is greater; the medical billing environment is much more complex with many more non-standard situations. At Disney, customers start out happy and excited instead of upset and underpaid. They line up but don’t care about your insurance claims, patient referrals, or compliance. They take a trip that is doubled a million times, while each new payer is a unique experience. Meanwhile, practice operations, technology, and legal costs are growing. Disney seems like a picnic compared to the nightmare billing and practice managers face every day in a hostile payment environment over which we have very little control of the kind we would at Disney.
Using examples from his work at Disney and as a high-level hospital executive, Fred Lee challenges the assumptions that have defined customer service in healthcare. In this unique book, he discovers the key similarities between Disney and hospitals: both provide an “experience,” not just a service. He shows how any company can emulate the strategies that earn Disney the trust and loyalty of its guests and employees.
This book also shows how standard service excellence initiatives in healthcare have not led to high patient satisfaction and loyalty, and defines 10 principles to help companies gain the competitive advantage that comes from being seen. as “the best” by its own employees, consumers, and community
This book is practical and deep. Instantly useful.