This book focuses on the patient experience as a leadership strategy. It explores the relationships between coordinated care, expert leadership, provider-patient communications, and the patient experience. When clinical and nonclinical staff collaborate effectively, healthcare teams can improve patient outcomes, prevent medical errors, improve efficiency, and increase patient satisfaction.

Surprisingly, however, healthcare leaders tend to prioritize specific metrics to improve hospital performance and patient satisfaction even though patient experience and provider-patient communications are intertwined. Determining the most effective strategy for achieving higher levels of service quality and patient satisfaction can prove elusive for providers.

Consider the evidence: a survey in 2012 of more than 17,000 healthcare leaders in North America, for example, found that leaders’ perceptions did not always match the data, and many hospital leaders overestimated the performance of their hospitals.

Ten years later, in 2022, only a few providers integrated best practices to achieve high patient satisfaction which severely impacted CMS Hospital Star Rating. This has significant effects on profit margins since patients consider the star rating differentials in their choices of hospitals and are willing to pay upward of 17% extra for treatments in 5-star hospitals, a revenue generating source of income at times when hospitals have seen falling revenues (down 4.8%) and rising labor (up 37%) from pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels.