Patient Loyalty And The Importance Of Brand Power In The Health Sector

One of the factorsthat increases patient loyalty is the prestige that the power of the brand gives you. Some patients choose and stay hospital simply believing in the power and prestige of the brand. One of the most important duties of such hospitals is not to damage this strong perception.

The prestigious hospital does not necessarily have to have brand power. But a hospital with brand power must be prestigious and fulfil the strength of the brand.

Your brand power builds over time, with your advertising work, your high service quality and your dignity in your business. Because branding means transforming into an institutionalized state of quality and nobility. Nobility, on the other hand, depends on having a well-worked corporate culture.

Institutional culture is realized by the understanding and acceptance of the logic of “This is how things work here” by all business partners that make up the institution.

The impact of corporate culture on the perception of prestige and therefore on the brand power you are trying to create is very high.

In hospitals with a strong corporate culture, all doctors and business partners adhere to established behavioural criteria that indicate how they should behave and give a more integrated image. Generally, strong and effective management is done by contacting healthcare consulting firms in India, and this is the reason why we would like to suggest the same thing for you, to contact an expert.

On the other hand, in hospitals with a weak corporate culture, everybody plays differently because no one is sure about what to do and how to do it.

In such hospitals, some doctors and nurses take the initiative and some criticize them constantly. As a result, a chaotic situation emerges, and the patient’s trust in the hospital is damaged.

Knowing your customers closely, following them and doing a deepened data study, establishing a strong call team with a good CRM support will benefit you in terms of customer relations in every sector.

Because in customer relations management, satisfied customers are reflected in the whole process and provide loyal customers. This naturally brings profitability.

Patient satisfaction is a component of assessing quality of care. The measurement of patient satisfaction is part of a global context of the rise in the role of the user in the organization of the health system and the growing role of quality approaches.

The service provided to the customer and therefore its appreciation hold a central place. Today, patients are active partners in the care offered to them and their satisfaction is considered as an indicator of the quality of care.

The collection of their point of view is necessary to assess the quality of a healthcare system as well as the technical considerations that healthcare professionals may deliver.

The quality of this new relationship between the patient and his doctor and the satisfaction expressed by the patient must be evaluated in order to bring about continuous improvement, and this can be done with the help of hospital management consultancy services.

Keep in mind that some patients are more familiar with the digital world than we think. Another recommendation is to reduce waiting times. It is also advisable to create a harmonious work environment. This influences the quality of care received and patient satisfaction with our services.

How To Achieve Long Term Goals Of Your Hospital With Patient Satisfaction?

Nowadays, as patients want to learn about their diseases and participate in the decisions made about them, providing healthcare services determined only by the healthcare team is not sufficient for the provision of quality healthcare services.

For this reason, patient satisfaction is considered as a service process focused on patient expectations and needs in quality health care. Because the patient whose expectations for healthcare services are not met and his family are candidates to become the patients of another hospital.

The orientation of clinics and hospitals is focused, in most cases, on health without considering the comprehensive experience that the patient lives in interaction with the institution.

Each point of contact establishes a perception that influences the Experience and that will undoubtedly be a reason for recommendation or disapproval.

Hospital management consulting company design service models and redesign internal processes to improve care and increase patient loyalty and recommendation.

There can be no improvement without first correcting the attention and ways of working. Providers of hospital consultancy services in India know how to approach change. They advise clinics and hospitals to improve from within and create positive experiences.

How to guarantee complete patient satisfaction? How does the patient feel your attention and care? That you are quick to answer their questions by shortening the time to get results? Ensure that your team delivers qualified, patient-centred care? How to shorten the length of hospital stay? Ensure patient safety in a hospital setting? Do you run a medical institution and are looking for answers to these questions every day?

Top hospital consultants in India offer a wide range of solutions to improve patient satisfaction.

As a healthcare manager, you strive to ensure complete patient satisfaction. For obvious reasons, each patient and his family is interested in their own experience of hospital stay: understanding health problems and their treatment; speedy recovery and return home; proper care and safety during hospital stay.

This means that you must provide fast and accurate diagnostics to solve the patient’s problem; appropriate level of training of personnel; provision of qualified medical care, patient flow management and bed allocation; creating safe conditions for hospital stay and rational use of antibiotics.

Medical staff must be qualified, motivated and provide quality patient-centred care. It is important that patients feel proper care of themselves. Clear workplace expectations and working principles help staff develop the right skills.

Hospital administrators must also support their staff to continue their education and keep abreast of new technologies and knowledge in the field of medicine.

Reducing the length of stay in medical institutions

For the patient, this is an early return home to his loved ones. For you, this is also the optimal operation of your institution and the provision of the best possible care for the majority of patients.

Measures of healthcare consulting firms in India on continuous improvement will help your hospital to improve their capacity to minimize waiting time, maximize productivity and improve patient care.

Why Is Supply Chain Management So Difficult For Hospitals?

The origin of the problem is easy to identify but not for that reason it has been easy to solve; the critical points of the process are subject to the different objectives of those who compose it and are not aligned with the hospital’s business objectives.

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Perhaps doctors give preference to the brands of equipment, drugs or items they were trained with, while the hospital administration is seeking to obtain good quality supply at affordable prices, thus the supply chain is inefficient and fragmented.

Favoring physician preferences for certain items can result in significant cost variations in the budget, and many hospitals are cornered by these types of decisions.

In reality, what the administration should look for is to buy items that contribute to the quality of the service provided to the patient and that have proven to give better results to patients, but how can you make these decisions if you do not have information from your chain of products?

The lack of systematization of the supply chain limits the transparency of the process that supplies follow.

The lack of systems prevents health institutions from accessing the information generated in the supply chain that would allow them to make more informed decisions regarding their processes.

Hospitals, dealers, and purchasing departments must know what they have, where it is used, who requests it, and when it will expire.

It is essential to have tools that automate the supply chain and have analytics of the processed information that allow hospitals to:

  • Have visibility of the route that supplies take
  • Have the power to provide higher quality services
  • Obtain actionable information from each process
  • Know the demand forecasts for an item by knowing where it is used.
  • Significantly avoid wastage due to expiration dates.
  • Avoid “ant storage” by staff.
  • Increase the transparency of prices by systematizing and standardizing the orders of these supplies made by your doctors.
  • Obtain information that allows monitoring the use of inputs.
  • Obtaining a cost-charge capture is more transparent and less complicated in finance and warehouse.
  • Increase the effectiveness of patient charges.

Technology enables the ability to capture data at all points in the supply chain and share the information generated with key people, these in turn transform this information into usable data for decision-making, making it an asset of the hospital business.

But to achieve the above, it is necessary to connect the supply chain process to the technology of daily use, with top hospital consultants in India, you will get the helpthat will allow you to control:

  • General storehouse
  • Warehouses and Inventories
  • Pricing Administration
  • Centralized and Local Purchases
  • Surrogate Control
  • Requests for Subrogated Material/Services
  • Studies/Articles to be authorized
  • Purchases to receive
  • Surrogate Study Reports

Hospital management consultancy in India offers healthcare players its expertise in the optimization and management of complex flows either in the form of development of decision support tools, or in the form of support during the design or reorganization of a process.

4 Activities That Promote Profitability In A Hospital

If you do not have an adequate financial strategy, sooner or later you will have problems fulfilling your mission and strategic objectives.

No matter what its mission is, whether it is non-profit or for-profit, whether it is publicly or privately owned, every hospital will benefit from an adequate financial strategy that supports its mission.

Profitability is the goal of every business, and hospitals are no exception. In a market as competitive as healthcare, it is difficult to keep all the activities carried out within a hospital institution profitable.

Here are 4 activities that promote the profitability of a hospital:

1. Innovate services to increase their market share

The decision to enter a new specialty to attract a market or increase its market share is a decision that must respond to an arduous investigation that provides information on the needs of the locality that serves the institution, as that would considerably increase your success rate and income.

The hospital must analyze the health trends of the population, with demographic data on possible chronic diseases that may occur and with statistics that help favor one specialty or another.

2. Plan your operation around occupancy to control costs

Today’s business intelligence offers the necessary visibility to make decisions in support of resource planning by providing occupancy statistical data over time periods, to make forecasts or to plan the personnel to be assigned according to the flow presented by area and/or days of the week.

When each medical director and each administrative director coordinate to forecast and plan staff, many savings and awareness are achieved in staff management.

3. Reduce warehouse costs by working with your supply chain and your doctors:

There is technology that enables data capture at all points in the supply chain, and sharing the information generated at these points with key people will allow the transformation of this into usable data for decision making, making it an asset of the hospital business.

An excellent practice to reduce costs is to identify the costs of the material used in the procedures, compare them with the national standards and share that information with the doctors to participate in the control of costs.

4. Subrogate some services:

On some occasions, as a consequence of all the operational needs of a hospital, it is easy to lose focus and have money leaks when performing activities outside the direct responsibilities of a hospital, which consist of providing care and patient services.

With this in mind, it is recommended to subrogate certain services such as cleaning, laundry, cafeteria and laboratory services, since when managed by third parties, significant savings are generated.

Top hospital consulting firms in India can help health systems make the right decisions about using competition as a tool to provide access to high-quality and effective health care.

Hospital management consulting company can deliver noticeable performance gains by helping healthcare organizations transform their fragmented activities and evolve them into integrated ecosystems of providers, customers and researchers who can interact with patients, caregivers and others in an individualized manner.

Factors Influencing Patients’ Satisfaction In A Hospital

The hospital produces medical care and services for the benefit of the patient and the latter, like any other client, must assess the quality of the care he has received and declare himself satisfied with it or change his doctor or establishment (if possibilities allow it).

Like any company that provides services, the hospital is part of a process of improving the quality of services provided to patients. Healthcare establishments must identify the quality requirements and needs of the population, as low-quality services can result in inestimable costs.

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Indeed, hospital logistics is part of the dynamic of the search for overall performance where activities are organized and structured with the aim of patient satisfaction in terms of quality, quantity, time, safety and at the lowest cost.

The challenges of health facilities are multiple: lack of quality infrastructure, low-level medical technology, lack of coverage, among others.

However, the solution to all these problems aims at a single objective: the satisfaction of the patients and the correct attention that each one of them deserves. Hospital management consultancy in India can help you in dealing with such type of issues easily.

The excellence of a health institution necessarily goes through one of the most important resources of any organization: the human factor. Getting a health care institution to position itself as a quality benchmark requires a manager with leadership skills, who solves conflicts and reduces work stress.

In the same way, the staff of a health institution will be more efficient when the treatment they receive is warmer, more respectful and friendly. Their motivation and recognition of their performance are factors that pay off and affect the quality of their work.

What factors are valued by the patient when choosing a medical center?

The perception you have of the sanitary facilities, their hygiene conditions, the degree of comfort that they generate, the possibilities of choice, the availability of advances in diagnosis and treatment will also guide your decision and will be a parameter of your satisfaction.

All this without forgetting the link that the patient will establish with the center beyond their consultation or discharge from hospital in the continuity of their care.

In addition to this, quality management has as a necessary component to ensure patient safety by taking care of the quality of the facilities, processes and therapies.

Satisfaction in health care entails, in short, meeting the expectations of excellence of a patient when what is in the hands of the professional and the center is their most precious asset, health.

One of the pressing issues of modern health care is to increase patient satisfaction with the received medical care during the rehabilitation process, including the assessment of both the organization of the process and the result of treatment.

Communication is not only an important component of therapeutic interaction, but also a factor that has a direct impact on the patient’s satisfaction with rehabilitation.

A personalized approach and well-functioning communication of staff with the patient have a pronounced positive effect on his satisfaction with medical care during the rehabilitation process.

To make your hospital management system more efficient and satisfying for your patients, it is suggested to turn to hospital consultancy services.

Safe Hospital Environment and Patient Safety

Any environment in which a person lives has certain factors that negatively affect him (risk factors). To maintain health, a person must be well adapted to them.

Hospitalization is always stressful for the body. Both the disease itself and the new environment force a person to change their usual way of life and to satisfy their needs in a new way.

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Therefore, the task of the medical staff is to maximally eliminate the influence of risk factors on the patient and to create conditions in the medical facility that will ensure his safety throughout the entire period of stay in the hospital.

A safe hospital environment is considered to be an environment in which the comfort and safety of both patients and medical staff of a health facility is provided. Such an environment is created by events of a certain nature:

  • Infection safety mode
  • Ensuring patient hygiene
  • Compliance by health workers with personal hygiene requirements
  • Therapeutic and protective regime of the medical facility.

Control over the implementation of measures to create a safe hospital environment is closely related to the complex overall assessment of the quality of nursing care.

The medical and protective regime is a complex of preventive and therapeutic measures aimed at ensuring maximum physical and mental comfort for patients and medical staff, and for this, hospital management consultancy in India is here for you.

The safety of the patient is an aspect increasingly key to the agents of the health sector. To guarantee a safe supply chain, it is necessary to make all the processes of both logistics management and patient care more efficient. Standards become at this point an essential factor to guarantee safe and efficient care.

Currently, a safe hospital environment is one of the most pressing and at the same time complex problems in the professional work of medical workers.

A safe hospital environment is defined as the environment that best provides the patient and healthcare professional with the comfort and safety conditions that effectively meet all of their vital needs, you can contact hospital consulting companies in India, if you are not able to make such environment in your hospital on your own.

The hospital environment has certain elements that negatively affect the health of both medical personnel and patients. To maintain health, a person must be well adapted to these risk factors.

The patient, getting into such an environment, is weakened, suffers physically and psychologically, both from the disease itself and from the unusual hospital environment for him.

Properly organized work of medical personnel will help the patient quickly adapt to the hospital environment and cope with the disease without prejudice to his health.

Considering that the main task of doctors is to take care of patients, they also try to do management tasks at the same time, bringing with it an increasing workload and problems.

The organization of the work of any hospital is aimed at creating a safe environment- both for its patients and for medical workers. Thus, it is important to turn to hospital consultancy in India to solve all the obstacles.

The Strategy Of Attracting Clients Of The Medical Center And Clinic

The consulting services that can be found for the health sector have reached a high degree of development, specialization and sophistication, allowing laboratories and companies in the sector to focus on their key competencies and on the steps of the value chain that they dominate, being able to efficiently subcontract the consulting services they require at all times.

While healthcare consumers demand safer, more effective and mobile healthcare services in the changing social order, healthcare providers face problems such as increasing costs, decreasing profit margins and limited qualified human resources.

OPTIONS FOR DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES OF THE MEDICAL CENTER

In any business, including the operation of medical centers, there are two key strategies for generating income for their owners, and these strategies can be easily followed with the help of hospital consultancy services in Delhi. The first strategy is customer acquisition. And there are 2 key tactics used here:

  • Expanding market share (enticing clients from other clinics and medical centers)
  • Entering new markets (searching for new customer segments, for example, offering services that were used by older people to other groups- for example, children, or entering new geographic territories: a city district, a new city, a new country).

This strategy still dominates the mindset of most healthcare owners today. Where to get new clients? This is a key question that top hospital consultants in India often hear in consultations, conferences and webinars.

The main tool for attracting customers, of course, is advertising in various channels and in various formats. However, it is worth considering that advertising and its costs will constantly increase, as competition will grow. At the same time, there are restrictions on advertising of medical centers and their services.

As a result, your advertising costs may eventually, if not now, amount to high rates, but the effectiveness can be very different from one campaign to another.

Why is this happening? It is important to understand here that often the leaders and owners of medical centers are highly qualified doctors who are experts in medical practice.

But your audience, your consumers and patients most often do not understand medicine as well as you do, therefore their language, their desires, needs, the way they express it differs significantly from the views of the owners and employees of the clinic.

As a result, it turns out that customers simply do not understand many of the offers in advertising and react poorly to it.

A customer retention strategy is also a non-obvious way to attract new, high-quality, ideal clients to a medical center. The first tactic that is fairly widely used for customer retention is creating transition barriers for customers.

Changing market conditions, a new competitor entering the market, copying your loyalty program, or a government decision to change the rules of the game can nullify any customer retention actions you take.

Therefore, starting to use tactics to create barriers to transition can be a good first step in customer retention, but your healthcare business will constantly be on a powder keg that will take off and smash it into pieces, and this is why before taking any step you need to consult hospital management consultancy in India.

How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Transforming The Health System

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Artificial intelligence (AI) – the ability of computers to learn human-like functions or tasks – has shown great promise. What was previously considered the sole domain of human cognition is already being successfully harnessed in many industries.

For healthcare information technology (IT) leaders, the goal of operational efficiency comes along with the pressure to get more out of the enormous volumes of data being collected across the enterprise, and this is why hospital management consulting companies are here for you, to assist you in every matter.

While AI has been around for decades, most healthcare organizations are still in the early stages of what AI will mean. AI is gaining momentum in healthcare due to its ability to generate insights from vast amounts of data, which is a much-needed help for overworked staff.

Now the tech industry is witnessing what appear to be major new advancements in AI that are generating a new wave of interest in how it could influence the future of healthcare.

The rapid digitization of health data through the use of health information technology has created significant opportunities in the use of AI. Innovators and experts see potential in using digital health data to improve health outcomes from both the home to the clinic and the community.

However, today’s AI is empowered and limited by its access to digital data. With a range of health-related data sets, AI could help improve the health of people.

The practice of medicine has undergone a digital transformation. Now it is possible to consult medical records of patients on digital platforms, thanks to this evolution, both patients and health personnel enjoy new benefits.

With new tools integrated into almost every aspect of the patient-physician relationship, it is crucial to realize that technology will not be able to replace the humanistic approach in which medicine operates, and just like this each and every medical center requires the help of hospital management consultancy in India.

AI uses new data processing tools to improve both medicine and the relationship between the patient and the doctor.

For example, to make the connection between data servers lighter and release that load so that specialists have more availability to handle other functions and thus redouble productivity.

In the current digital context of the health sector, we find a multitude of processes in which artificial intelligence speeds up and facilitates work.

Initially, it was mainly dedicated to disease diagnosis and in recent years it has even transitioned to treating diseases. What is clear is that its applications are innumerable.

AI can thus facilitate and streamline many health processes. Not everyone has the level of technical knowledge required to interact with this type of innovative technologies, so many organizations and companies are investing time and resources in generating skills in the adoption of different technologies, as an investment in the future.

There is also some risk.

Beyond the potential benefits, one must assess the possible realistic implications of AI applications in health, and understand the risks.

Hospitals- How Are They Built?

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The construction of a property starts from a necessity. This premise becomes more evident when buildings seek the provision of services, as is the case of a hospital.

To build a medical center there are countless rules and guidelines to make it a safe, comfortable and efficient place. The construction process of a hospital is complex from the beginning to the end.

The interdisciplinary team that builds it is made up of engineers, architects, technicians and, of course, doctors- the future ‘home owners’. To build a hospital, you have to think about the services that will be offered and the kind of patients that will be treated.

This is part of the Functional Medical Program, a hospital construction and management system. The more services the medical unit provides, each space will require technical specifications for its construction.

From the fact that health is a public service, the quality of the services will be guaranteed through the correct interrelation of the different areas, the product of a good structural design.

Barrier-free hospitals

The concept encompasses construction, management and administration issues. In order for a medical center to have no barriers, its accessibility, patient mobilization, footage of the waiting room, etc. must be considered.

A barrier-free hospital has four characteristics: safety, ecology, accessibility, and intelligence. Medical centers are considered smart when functions such as biological, physical and operational security are automated.

The air conditioning of spaces, for example, is a fundamental aspect that must be considered in hospital space planning designs.

Now, medical units are modular, so they can be adapted to the terrain in which they are going to be built. Gone are the hospitals with massive baseboards, enameled walls, and dark corridors. Today, they have large hallways, natural lighting and systematized doors.

The accessibility is another important point. Along with construction, it is necessary to think about the access routes to get there and, in the design of the sanitation and wiring systems of the health home.

The growth perspective must not be ignored. It is recommended that between 35% and 40% of the land be planned for the creation of green areas such as gardens and opportunities for growth.

Design and projection

Expanding a hospital- which did not plan its growth from the beginning – is more expensive than building a new one. Although the constructive trend is to go upwards, hospitals are a special case. It is possible to evacuate more floors as long as the interrelation of areas is maintained.

You cannot have an Emergency on the ground floor and the Intensive Care Unit on the fifth floor. This has a negative effect on efficiency.

Hospital designs and hospital space planners have evolved. Before, the ‘herringbone’ structure was based on a long corridor with choppy circulations. The trend lasted for years, until ‘verticalization’ was incorporated into medical units.

Communication between areas is a transversal axis for the design of the hospital expansion. If this factor is not taken into account, more patient traffic is generated in the corridors and, in some cases, customers can get lost.

The expansion involves an analysis of the care process: the entry of the patient, their care and departure.

For this reason, the doctor is the right hand of the builder, since it is he who knows in detail the interrelationships of units. Achieving the correct flow of patients is the challenge for contractors. This saves lives and saves financial and human resources.

Strengthen Your Hospital With The Help Of Management Consultants

Before trying to analyse the present and future of health consulting, it is interesting to have a global vision of the consulting business and its evolution in recent years.

Taking into account that experience tells us that most of the general trends in the industrial and service sectors in our environment end up being applied in the health sector in general, and in the public in particular, we could assume that the trends that we are going to see then they can more or less faithfully mark the future of healthcare consulting.

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Business photo created by yanalya on freepik

In any case, trying to go deeper than the definition in the field of consulting is not an easy task, since we are integrating under this umbrella in which there is a large number of services and activities that differ greatly from each other.

Healthcare management consulting in India can encompass all the processes to help organizations define their strategies, improve the efficiency of their operations and optimize the resources of your organization, whether technological or human.

Business consulting has been incorporated into the life of organizations for more than 40 years; on the other hand, its incorporation into the health sector has been recent.

In the health sector, there is a permanent need for change, which requires that the management of the institutions involved respond adequately to the new realities and demands placed on it.

The medical management consultant proposes specific support and solutions for management problems faced by medical institutions such as hospitals and nursing homes, pharmaceuticals and medical device manufacturers.

Healthcare management consulting is a method of intervention in the field of business consulting, aimed at developing both the competencies of people and teams in the health sector and management skills, from a perspective focused on problem solving and a vision that interrelates the multiple subsystems that make up the organization.

For example, medical management consultants can create advertisements like regular companies or use branding marketing techniques to help hospitals attract more patients.

In addition, small related hospitals are gathered to help them move into one building, and plans for all areas necessary for operation such as financing plan establishment and hospital location selection are established and implemented.

Medical management consultants are similar to management consultants in that they provide hospitals with services used in general management consulting for efficient operation of hospitals.

However, medical management consultants must have as much professional knowledge as medical personnel and an understanding of the medical industry environment and medical industry technology. In a word, it is a multiplayer in the field of business and medicine.

Top hospital consulting firms in India predict the needs of patients who will use the device and consult on how to secure funds to purchase new devices, so they should not neglect their efforts to acquire knowledge and information about new high-tech medical devices.

In addition, if you are looking for improvements in the diagnostic and treatment procedures of a hospital, you need to develop a differentiated perspective to provide a wide range of services that encompass both doctors and patients. Because of this, many people who have been in the medical field have entered the market.