In this Article
By: Kendall Upton
Professional insights: Serena Wiseman
Patient experience manager key takeaways
With the proliferation of jobs like Chief Experience Officer (CXO) and similar job titles across many different industries, organizations large and small are hiring people to focus solely on managing the customer experience in a way that goes further than skin-deep customer service—and healthcare is no exception.
Although cultivating positive patient experiences in healthcare settings is itself not new, many are realizing that patient experience is vital to the lifeblood of the organization. Patient experience managers, as they are often called, are indispensable members of the healthcare administration team whose work touches just about every corner of a healthcare organization. If you want to be a part of making healthcare a more positive experience for clinicians and patients alike, working as a patient experience manager just might be your calling.
Patient experience managers explained
Patient experience managers are healthcare managers that oversee numerous elements of the patient experience to ensure it is as positive as possible.
Patient experience managers may go by similar job titles such as patient experience specialists, coordinators, officers or directors. The differences between these jobs depend on the structure of the individual healthcare organization. Typically, titles that include “manager” or “director” are going to involve more responsibilities like managing other employees compared to “specialists” or “coordinators.”
“It is not uncommon for a patient experience officer to be a physician who leads patient experience for a particular healthcare facility,” said Serena Wiseman, a patient experience manager in the Office of Patient Experience for the Cleveland Clinic, “but this can vary from organization to organization”.
Patient experience managers are not a new role per se, but they’ve arguably become more prominent in the last twenty years since the development of the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey. First developed in 2002 by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), HCAHPS “is the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients’ perspectives of hospital care,” CMS states.
Survey results and scores from HCAHPS are important metrics for patient experience officers to analyze and act on, but it’s also not the only data that matters.
“While many hospitals have collected information on patient satisfaction for their own internal use, until HCAHPS there was no national standard for collecting and publicly reporting information about patient experience of care that allowed valid comparisons to be made across hospitals locally, regionally and nationally,” CMS states.
Why patient experience matters
The AHRQ identifies eight aspects of patient experience:
Ensuring that these aspects of a patient’s experience are positive is the ultimate goal for all patient experience roles. But it’s not simply a matter of getting good reviews and HCAHPS scores. It’s vital to the long-term success of a healthcare organization.
After surveying 21,000 patients, one study found that 78% of people say ease of navigation factors are the reason for leaving their healthcare providers. This included things like difficulty doing business, poor experiences with administrative staff and inadequate digital services and support solutions—in other words, patient experience factors. As healthcare organizations realize how important positive patient experiences are, they are hiring patient experience professionals to oversee this aspect of the organization. Knowing how to mitigate the pain points causing frustration could prove invaluable to the organization and its ability to retain patients.
“Anecdotal comments from patients provide a valuable insight into their relationship-centered needs and expectations,” Wiseman said. “Reading these comments also helps give us a better understanding into which caregiver behaviors have the greatest impact into the patients’ experience.”
What do patient experience managers do?
“Patient experience managers are caregivers who help support patient experience in our organization. We do this by presenting and doing deep dives into our HCAHPS data and our medical practice data,” Wiseman said. “Another aspect of our role is to educate our teams to be exceptional in building relationships with the patient; to strategize around process improvement and to continue to connect our teams to the bigger picture.”
Though each individual job has its own unique set of job responsibilities, these are some of the common duties performed by patient experience professionals:
“In the Office of Patient Experience at the Cleveland Clinic, we also created curriculum to educate our teams on how to provide good customer service and how to address service recovery in the moment,” Wiseman said. “The intention of creating the curriculum for our teams is to help define our expected service behaviors and provide resources for our teams to help build relationships.”
Where do they work?
Patient experience managers can work at numerous different healthcare organizations, but most work for hospitals and health systems. In one study, author Melanie Meyer from the University of Massachusetts analyzed 280 patient experience job postings across the country. The findings showed that 85% of the listings were for hospitals or health systems. Other types of employers included:
- Insurance companies
- Integrated delivery systems
- Physicians’ practices
- Post-acute care
Requirements to become a patient experience manager
The required qualifications to be a patient experience manager vary widely. Factors like the needs of the organization and the seniority level of the position can all affect what qualifications are necessary.
Education requirements
Meyer’s study that analyzed job listings for patient experience roles also examined their minimum education requirements, among other data points. About 45% of all postings required at least a bachelor’s degree, followed by a high school diploma (22.5%), unspecified education requirements (18.9%), master’s degree (10.4%) and an associate degree (3.2%). This data suggests that most patient experience positions want candidates to have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
“Most of my colleagues’ degrees are in business, psychology or education,” Wiseman said, but added that her colleagues come from a wide range of educational backgrounds.
Even though positions may not require your degree to be in any particular subject, a healthcare administration or healthcare management degree would be highly applicable to the role. Other applicable disciplines include:
Experience
Patient experience officers are not typically entry-level roles, so you can expect to need a few years of relevant experience working in a healthcare setting and/or in an administrative or customer service role to qualify. That same study found that 52.5% of job postings requested between three to seven years of experience, and 17.5% of listings requested one to two years of experience. Some listings requested over seven years of experience, but it’s safe to assume that these were probably senior-level management roles.
Certifications
The Beryl Institute offers certifications for patient experience professionals. The Certified Patient Experience Professional (CPXP) certification is an excellent credential to work towards as some more advanced jobs may prefer or require it, but it can only be obtained after working as a patient experience professional for a few years.
To earn this certification, you must pass the associated exam. In order to be eligible for the exam, the PXI states that “Applicants should possess at least three years of professional experience in an experience-related role or have a background as a healthcare professional involved in patient experience efforts. Alternatively, applicants may qualify as consultants or patient and family advocates dedicated to experience excellence. Those without this experience must demonstrate the completion of 30 Patient Experience Continuing Education credits (PXEs).”
What to expect as a patient experience manager
There are times where patient experience managers are engaged in quiet, individual work—analyzing survey data, brainstorming solutions or preparing a presentation for their colleagues, for instance—but much of the job involves a lot of face-to-face interaction with a range of people in the organization.
“In this role, it is important for the person to be relationship-centered,” Wiseman said. “Building relationships and having good communication skills are imperative in this role.”
“When you’re working with so many people in so many different roles, departments and levels of seniority, it’s important to maintain humility, curiosity, respect and confidence,” Wiseman said.
When you consider the far-reaching impact that patient managers can have on a healthcare facility or organization, it can be an incredibly gratifying career.
“I love every aspect of my job,” Wiseman said. “I believe that every single person comes to work every single day to be successful. And I love being able to support our teams achieving success.”
Still, the job isn’t without its challenges.
“There are so many conflicting priorities that exist at any one time. Patient experience is akin to bringing about culture change, which has its own challenges. Even though we review data and anecdotal feedback from patients, it is not always clear what strategies will drive the change that we are looking for. Improvement relies on a lot of variables: data, feedback, project management and time, just to name a few,” Wiseman said.
Important skills for success
If you’re thinking about whether you could make it as a patient experience manager, consider whether you have some of these essential skills that Wiseman said are keys for success:
- Interpersonal communication:
- In a job that’s all about relationships, it helps to be a strong written and oral communicator.
- Data analysis:
- A part of a patient experience manager’s job is analyzing patient feedback data to help draw conclusions and come up with ideas on how to improve the patient’s experience. It’s important, Wiseman said, to “be able to analyze data, and if that’s not a strength, being willing to learn and better understand data.”
- Organization:
- Patient experience managers must juggle numerous ongoing projects and thrive in an environment where no two days are the exact same. This requires organizational finesse and a keen attention to detail.
- Creative problem solving:
- When there are obstacles in an organization that are making progress difficult, the solution is not always easy to identify. As a patient experience manager, you must be a creative problem solver willing to think outside the box to resolve these issues.
- Open-mindedness:
- Coming up with new ideas and solutions to patient experience challenges is a collaborative effort. “Being open to other people’s thoughts and ideas is very important,” Wiseman said.
- Emotional intelligence:
- Going hand-in-hand with interpersonal communication, being able to understand and interpret your emotions and the emotions of others is paramount to any job where you work a lot with other people. “High emotional intelligence is also very important,” Wiseman said.
Patient experience manager salary
Patient experience manager is a specific job title within the fields of healthcare administration and management. Because of this, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not track salary data for this role specifically. However, patient experience managers would likely fall under the category of medical and health services managers. According to the 2023 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics from the BLS, the median annual salary for medical and health services managers is $117,960.
Factors including location, years of experience, job title and education can all affect the earning potential for patient experience positions.
What’s next?
Patient experience managers are essential members of the healthcare administration ecosystem who are dedicated to ensuring that patients have a positive experience with their facility and organization. If you think you have what it takes to excel in this dynamic role, hit our Find Schools button to take the first step towards your career.