22.06.2017

Patient dining gives private hospitals the edge

Becoming the private hospital of choice requires an intense focus on the experience. Here’s how five-star dining and service makes you standout.

By 2020, a revolution in consumer expectations will be well underway: when it comes to choosing a service or provider, experience will be everything.

This shift has been quietly happening for some time now. Today’s empowered consumer has easy access to all the information they need to get a rounded picture of what’s on offer. As a result, expectations have risen and grown more sophisticated — and experience has overtaken both price and product in importance within the choice process.

And by 2020, consumers will expect providers to deliver a personalised experience, where their current and future needs are proactively addressed (Walker, 2017).

So what does this mean for health providers, particularly private hospitals?

Expecting a five-star experience

Your private patients are likely to be in the vanguard of this revolution. Which means this experience-centric approach is already your operating environment. Your prospective patient does their research regarding medical expertise and the costs of a private hospital stay — and quickly looks beyond those factors. They’re choosing their private hospital based on the elements that will exactly match their wants and needs. Their focus is shifting to how the private hospital can add as much comfort and pleasure as possible into what may well be a stressful experience.

In fact, private patients are now measuring their experience in the same way that they would assess the performance of a five-star hotel. As well as continual, vigilant healthcare, they’re expecting fine dining that wouldn’t seem out of place in a restaurant — with the attentive service to match.

The importance of a focus on fine dining