NRC Health dives into the wealth of data from millions navigating the healthcare landscape to craft a bold outlook for the coming year. 

During February’s Becker’s Healthcare podcast, Gregory Makoul, Ph.D., M.S., Chief Transformation Officer at NRC Health, joined host Erika Spicer-Mason to discuss the latest findings from the NRC Health 2024 Experience Perspective, which blends research insights with a perspective aimed at enriching strategies encompassing brand identity, consumer engagement, patient care, and employee experience to find trends helpful to the industry. 

“We listen very, very carefully to the people who are running and working in healthcare organizations—and what we hear is hope,” Makoul says. “Hope, with a big dose of reality in terms of what people are up against. We continue to hear things like, Just getting back to the basics would be transformative. You’ve got to be thinking about follow-through and execution for everything we’re doing, and recognizing that it’s hard, it’s complicated, but it’s possible to get things done. So we offer a forward-thinking, forward-leaning perspective on the fundamentals we’ve identified and pressure-tested in concert with experienced leaders across the country.”

The NRC Health 2024 Experience Perspective offers three main insights, including: 

Part 1: Innovation Starts with Fundamentals 

Part 2: Understanding Detractors 

Part 3: Emerging Trends 

Here are some highlights from the podcast: 

Fundamentals encapsulate consumer, patient, and employee experience in a cohesive approach. Getting back to basics stresses the need to move beyond traditional silos and adopt an operational culture that prioritizes experience quality, safety, equity, and brand perception for all stakeholders. 

“I think it’s really important to go further and recognize that we’ve got to build an operational culture that recognizes that experience quality, safety, equity, and even brand all come down to focusing on what matters for every patient and consumer, as well as those who serve them, right?” Makoul says. “We’ve got to get past this idea that experience needs to be doing something different or competing with people focusing on quality, safety, or equity. It’s all one big dot. 

“If you take it from that point of view, you quickly recognize that experience is not an extra added attraction—that quality is not the sole purview of the quality team, that safety is not the only focus of a higher reliability mindset, and at root, that equity or the lack of equity is woven through every single decision and discussion that happens in a healthcare organization.” 

This year, organizations should prioritize safety, patient-centeredness, effectiveness, communication, and cleanliness. NRC Health’s report found a high degree of endorsement for the idea that safety goes beyond just preventing physical harm. It’s also about preventing emotional harm and ensuring a safe environment of care.

“We also ascertain that people are paying very close attention to whether or not the team is treating them with respect, making them feel heard,” Makoul says. “Safety has components of experience, quality, and equity, and all of these are related. I think we all feel like we’re banging our heads against the wall a little bit when we’re trying to make improvements, and we’re feeling stuck because we’re not recognizing, in the way that we operate, that it’s all one big dot. 

“In addition to the one-big-dot approach, it’s all about human connection,” he adds. “We’re talking about advancing Human Understanding, frontline first. The focus here is getting strategic about accountability and co-design, which is the last fundamental that we talk about to amplify consumer and community voices. Innovation starts with these fundamentals.” 

ACCESS YOUR COPY: Get your copy of NRC Health’s 2024 Experience Perspective. 

WATCH THE WEBCAST: Unpack the results with our presenters.