Lessons Learned in Changing Healthcare... and how we learned them :: Longwoods.com

Who Is the Customer?

........ "Who's the customer?" Well, of course, our answer was, "It's the patient." The board told us to take a closer look.
So we did. We performed a deep dive on our processes, and we found out that most of them were designed around us, not the patient. If you think about it, what are waiting rooms but places for patients to hurry up, be on time and then wait for us? What happens in most hospitals on Saturdays and Sundays? Patients wait for Monday so that things can get done.
The more we probed, the more we realized that the patient did not come first. I emphasize this point, because it is our true north and basic to everything we have done in the years since.