How to Improve Patient Experience (and Healthcare System Performance)

Improving patient experience is about more than increasing satisfaction scores. For healthcare systems, the way clinicians and staff care for patients can reveal how well, or poorly, communication, access, coordination, digital tools, and other parts of your organization are working.

That makes patient experience both a clinical priority and a business issue.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) notes that positive patient experiences are associated with:

• Adherence to clinician recommendations and better outcomes
• Lower medical malpractice risk
• Greater employee satisfaction (and less turnover)
• Continued business from patients

However, healthcare systems seeking to improve patient experience need to look beyond customer service. Sustainable improvement requires identifying friction across the patient journey and addressing the underlying processes that create it.

Why should healthcare systems improve patient experience?

Patient experience can influence several areas of healthcare system performance.

First, money. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) includes patient experience among the measures used in its Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program. Participating hospitals have 2% of Medicare payments withheld, with that pool used to fund value-based incentive payments based on performance.

But reimbursement is only part of the business case. As indicated, AHRQ reports that higher patient experience is associated with increased likelihood of recommendations, greater patient retention, and fewer complaints (as well as the previously listed benefits).

A 2023 study in the European Journal of Health Economics looked at 132 Swiss acute care hospitals. The authors’ analysis demonstrated that “better patient experience is associated with a higher proportion of elective patients, greater revenue, and lower costs.”

Deloitte’s own analysis of patient experience and hospital profitability showed that:

• Hospitals with higher patient experience scores earn “disproportionately more” than they spend compared to their lower-rated peers.
• Highly engaged staff likely improves patient experience.
• VBP incentives only account for about 7% of the financial gain, as measured by net margins, when measuring the monetary effects of improved patient experience.

Improving that experience can affect not only how patients feel about an encounter, but also how they engage with a healthcare system afterward. And their choice to continue using your hospital has implications to the tune of 93% of the possible benefit.

How to improve patient experience scores

1. Find patient friction before trying to fix the score

Healthcare systems have an abundance of patient data. The challenge is turning it into specific improvements.

The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey measures things like communication with doctors and nurses, staff responsiveness, care coordination, communication about medications, discharge information, and whether patients would recommend the hospital.

HCAHPS and other CAHPS surveys can identify broad strengths and weaknesses, but organizations can also examine complaints, patient comments, scheduling data, portal interactions, call-center data, safety reports, and other sources to understand why patients are having poor experiences.

AHRQ’s CAHPS Improvement Guide recommends analyzing multiple sources of patient feedback and applying established quality improvement approaches to patient experience.

“Different stakeholders have unique perspectives you need to consider all together to understand the full dynamics involved in delivering and receiving healthcare and how those dynamics influence patients’ experiences with care,” according to the guide.

Healthcare systems can even conduct patient walkthroughs. AHRQ recommends following the process as a patient would and identifying what takes too long, causes complaints, costs too much, creates waste, or involves unnecessary complexity.

This shifts the question from, “How do we raise our score?” to, “What is making care harder for our patients?”

The second question is far more actionable.

2. Treat patient communication as a clinical competency

Communication can shape whether patients understand their conditions, medications, follow-up care, and next steps.

As stated, patient-provider communication correlates with adherence to medical advice and treatment plans and better clinical processes and outcomes, according to AHRQ.

Healthcare systems can improve patient experience by strengthening competencies such as:

• Active listening
• Plain-language communication
• Teach-back
• Shared decision-making
• Effective discharge conversations

Family and caregiver communication also matters. A 2023 JAMA Network Open study of 2,763 acute-care hospitals examined the effects of states implementing Caregiver Advise, Record, Enable (CARE) Act requirements. As said by the authors, “The [CARE] Act is a state-level policy designed to facilitate communication among patients, caregivers, and clinical care teams during hospitalization to improve patient experience.”

Hospitals in states implementing the policy experienced improvements in measures of clinician communication and discharge information relative to hospitals in states without implementation.

(And remember, better patient experience is better for the bottom line.)

Consequently, healthcare systems should consider patients and their caregivers as part of the communication process, not just recipients of information at discharge.

3. Support the workforce responsible for the experience

You can’t improve patient experience by asking clinicians to “provide better service.” You need to examine the environment they’re providing care in.

A 2024 longitudinal study of U.S. hospitals examined changes in nurse staffing, their skill mix, nurse education, and work environment. Among those factors, improvements in the work environment had the strongest association with improved HCAHPS ratings.

“Our findings provide hospital administrators with empirical evidence that may help make informed decisions on how to best invest limited resources to improve HCAHPS ratings, including the potential utility of improving the work environment through enhancing Nursing Quality of Care and Nurse Participation in Hospital Affairs,” the authors said.

For healthcare system leaders, that distinction matters.

Training can strengthen communication, service recovery, leadership, teamwork, and other important competencies. But training cannot compensate indefinitely for broken workflows, insufficient support, poor communication systems, or organizational barriers.

Instead, healthcare systems should pair workforce development with improvements to the environment in which employees work.

4. Remove friction across the entire patient journey

A patient’s experience begins before entering a hospital room and continues after leaving it.

Consider the number of interactions involved in a typical healthcare journey.

The goal should not simply be making individual interactions friendlier. Rather, organizations should identify unnecessary effort across the patient journey.

5. Make digital convenience sustainable for patients and clinicians

Digital tools offer opportunities to improve patient experience. Portals, online scheduling, electronic communication, test-result access, and other capabilities can give patients greater access to their healthcare information.

But convenience isn’t free.

The American Medical Association reported in 2024 that patient portals have also created additional administrative work as care teams manage growing volumes of inbox messages. It recommends optimizing portal workflows to engage patients while minimizing care-team burden.

Removing friction for your patients should not just transfer it to your clinicians and support staff.

Healthcare systems should evaluate digital experience from both sides:

• Who answers messages?
• What should be automated?
• Which requests need clinical review?
• How quickly should patients expect a response?
• What are the alternatives for patients who struggle with (or just don’t like) digital tools?

6. Use continuous improvement instead of one-time initiatives

Patient experience improvement shouldn’t be a campaign with an end date.

AHRQ recommends using established quality improvement methods, including the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle, to plan interventions, implement them, monitor results, and expand successful improvements. It also recommends testing interventions on a small scale before broader implementation.

For example, instead of rolling out a new discharge process throughout your entire healthcare system, one unit could test it first.

Leaders could measure:

• Patient understanding of discharge instructions
• Follow-up questions and calls
• Patient complaints
• Staff time required
• HCAHPS discharge measures
• Readmissions or other relevant quality measures

If the intervention works without creating unacceptable burdens elsewhere, the healthcare system can refine and expand it.

What are the risks and costs of trying to improve patient experience?

Improvement initiatives require resources, and not every intervention produces a positive return. Some of the more common risk factors are that:

• Training requires time. Removing clinicians from patient care for education has a cost, particularly when staffing is already constrained.
• Technology can create new workloads. Patient portals and messaging can improve access while increasing administrative demands on clinicians.
• Process changes can shift work around instead of eliminating it. A faster patient-facing process may create additional work elsewhere if the entire workflow isn’t redesigned.
• Digital transformation can create access barriers. Organizations have to account for patients who cannot or prefer not to use digital channels.
• Measurement can become the objective. If leaders focus too heavily on HCAHPS scores, organizations risk optimizing individual metrics instead of addressing the underlying patient experience.

That’s why healthcare systems should evaluate patient experience initiatives with the same rigor applied to other quality-improvement projects.

Improving patient experience means improving the system around the patient

There is no single intervention that will improve patient experience across every healthcare system.

Instead, improvement comes from identifying and reducing places where patients encounter friction, strengthening communication across patients and staff, supporting the healthcare workforce, and continuously measuring whether changes actually work.

The most important lesson for healthcare system leaders is that raising HCAHPS scores by X% won’t increase revenue by Y%. Instead, it is a commitment to improving service to your patients, knowing that it leads to long-term, sustained dividends at the bottom line.

Frequently asked questions about how to improve patient experience

What is the best way to improve patient experience in hospitals?

There is no single best intervention. Healthcare systems should first use patient feedback and operational data to identify specific sources of friction. Common improvement opportunities include communication, access, care coordination, discharge processes, workforce support, digital tools, and service recovery.

AHRQ recommends using established quality-improvement methods to test and measure interventions rather than relying on isolated initiatives.

How can hospitals improve patient experience scores?

Hospitals can analyze HCAHPS results to identify specific areas for improvement, such as clinician communication, staff responsiveness, care coordination, medication communication, discharge information, and the hospital environment.

However, organizations should investigate the operational causes behind low scores instead of focusing only on the scores themselves.

What are the business benefits of improving patient experience?

Potential benefits include stronger patient retention and recommendations, fewer complaints, better performance on patient-experience measures, and improved revenue — both from VBP reimbursement and through the general financial benefits demonstrated by high patient experience scores.

Patient experience can also expose inefficient or unsafe processes that affect broader organizational performance.

How does employee experience affect patient experience?

The two can be closely connected. A 2024 longitudinal study found that changes in the nursing work environment had the strongest association with improved HCAHPS ratings among the nursing-resource factors studied. Therefore, patient-experience strategies should consider the systems and working conditions supporting frontline employees.