Customer service
Increasingly, healthcare professionals, like other businesspeople, are sensing a need to focus more and more on the customer.
“There was a time there where the attitude in the medical profession was, We’re professionals, and you sit there and tell you when you come in and what to do.” Hughes said. “I remember asking a surgeon what happens if you can’t communicate with your doctor, and he said you find another doctor. It’s what you would do with a car salesman, or a grocery store. Why not do it with something as vital as your health? The medical profession has realized that these are customers, and if you don’t give them good customer service they’re going to take their business elsewhere.”
The hospitals say that their data shows that local patients are increasingly keeping their business right here in the Hudson Valley. While much of that is down to bridging the gap between what’s offered elsewhere and what patients can find in their own back yard, it can also be less stressful to stay close to home.
“It’s a hassle to go two or three hours down to New York City or an hour and a half up to Albany,” said Ping. “For cardiac and cancer services, it’s stressful on your family, it’s stressful on you as the patient. If you have a good local option, that’s a much better approach. I’ll use an example from the orthopedic side: We had a patient recently who happens to be an employee of mine who has had a couple different surgeries that he had down at the Hospital for Special Surgery, and he recently had his hips replaced. And he chose to go to Northern Dutchess Hospital for that. And he said if he would have known that the capabilities that we had at Northern Dutchess were that good when he had his other surgeries done, he would have stayed local. There would have been no reason for him not to.”
Hughes agreed.
