The Cleveland Clinic Way – Lessons in Excellence From One of the World’s Leading Healthcare Organizations – Toby Cosgrove, M.D. (McGraw Hill Education)

Imagine…you have built what easily ranks as one of the most respected, world renowned brands/institutions in healthcare, noted for its delivery of medical excellence in a wide range of service lines. One day a patient arrives at the facility and in the course of receiving that world class care they have a negative experience with a hospital technician or a housekeeper or food service staff – what are they likely to remember about their time at your facility? You probably guessed correctly.

As a professional healthcare marketer I have personally experienced the frustration of developing and marketing centers of medical excellence within a healthcare organization only to have patients have a terrible experience resulting in them leaving the facility outright and taking their business with them or losing future business based on the bad experience. I took the initiative to make customer service and customer experience, a function of the marketing department to help ensure a positive patient experience every step of the way from door to discharge.

It is that pursuit of excellence, not only on the medical side, but also the total patient focused experience the Dr. Toby Cosgrove, the president and CEO of the Cleveland Clinic writes about in The Cleveland Clinic Way – Lessons in Excellence From One of the World’s Leading Healthcare Organizations. Cosgrove details the innovative strategies that the Cleveland Clinic has undertaken to utilize a team work approach to the delivery of care and the unique care models it employees in that process.

Cosgrove offers insight into patient focused efforts to meet and exceed patient needs and an emphasis on customer service. In the book Cosgrove talks about a trip to the Harvard Business School where during the course of an interaction with a student he was asked if the Cleveland Clinic “taught empathy.” He tells how that brief interaction resulted in a shift in focus for care delivery to account for the patient’s perception of care. To reinforce the empathy approach to care the Cleveland Clinic’s communications department has put together one of the most effective, most shared and most often downloaded pieces of content marketing in the healthcare industry in the form of a video simply titled Empathy.

 

Utilizing a combination of innovation, collaboration, customer centric focus, and technology; while Cosgrove’s focus is on healthcare, the innovative approach he writes about can certainly be adapted to any customer facing industries.