EP228: How to Figure Out What Patients Really Want, With Julie Rish, PhD, From the Cleveland Clinic

There’s a great video of Steve Jobs responding to an audience question that is, at a minimum, let’s just say strident. Jobs kind of ignores the aggressive nature of the query and offers a thoughtful response which is super relevant to health care. He says, “One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.”

I don’t know about you, but I find this quote over-the-top relevant in health care. In health care, when we contemplate changing the workflow or integrating some technology or building some technology or whatever else we’re up to, how many times are we starting from the perspective of the patient or member? How often is the patient the “why” behind “why are we prioritizing this?”

I wonder, in the health care industry, how many meetings go on about what patients want with no patients in the meetings and no real consideration to that end. As a data point, probably twice a week I hear of a new program, product, service, device, digital something or other that has zero or only a few patients using it because only after development did anyone check with patients what they think about the thing. And then sometimes the patient gets blamed and labeled nonadherent to something they didn’t want in the first place.

I met Julie, by the way, at the PanAgora CX conference this past March.

You can connect with Julie on Twitter at @julie_rish.

Julie Rish, PhD, is a clinical psychologist for the Bariatric and Metabolic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic.