Healthcare Mangement

As all of us in insurance know (particularly those of us in sales), a good customer experience is important in retaining the customer. Many businesses spend significant time and effort in managing customer outcomes, but for some businesses adverse outcomes impact a lot more than customer retention. In healthcare, adverse outcomes impact customer health and the organization’s liability. According to a New York Times article (see here), Cincinnati Children’s Hospital has gained a reputation for high quality healthcare through a focus on specialization and patient outcomes.

Reasons for the hospital’s national renown include its market-niche focus on certain rare or complex conditions. A medical-team approach coordinates the efforts of the various specialists who handle each child’s case.
These days, Cincinnati Children’s devotes its energy to narrow specialties where it can develop a true expertise — like Fanconi anemia, a rare genetic disease that leads to bone marrow failure.

Tracking outcomes is difficult and expensive, and most organizations either don’t do it or don’t do it well. Cincinnati Children’s takes it one step further.

Cincinnati Children’s is among the relatively few medical centers that meticulously collect a wide range of data, to let the hospital see whether patients are getting good, effective care — and to look for ways to improve.
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital rigorously tracks how its patients fare, both in the hospital and after they leave.

What the article does not talk about is the impact this approach has on its medical malpractice insurance costs. It is likely that better patient outcomes, which the patients appreciate, has led to lower claim frequency and lower insurance costs. If so, this is another example of customer quality and risk management going hand in hand.