Healthcare is making remarkable advances in personalized care, thanks in part to artificial intelligence and other innovations. But some of the most important ways we personalize the patient experience have nothing to do with technology. They come down to how we treat the person in front of us.

Here’s the challenge: We spend years teaching clinicians how to diagnose and treat illness, but devote far less attention to teaching them how to create an exceptional patient experience.

If we want clinicians to excel at both, we need to prepare them for both.

That’s why my colleague Ori Litvak and I developed Survival Skills™, a patient experience course modeled on advanced cardiac life support and advanced trauma life support. Our premise is simple: Patient experience is a discipline that can be taught, practiced, and reinforced.

The goal is to give clinicians practical skills that make their jobs easier while making patients’ lives better. (Yes, we can do both!)

So how do we put these skills to work? Here are three concepts we teach that help clinicians understand what patients need and respond in ways that make their experience better.

Every patient needs two diagnoses. In addition to diagnosing the patient’s medical condition, we need to diagnose the experience they’re having.

Think about two people arriving at an emergency department. One is experiencing a heart attack. Another is a parent bringing in a child with a fever. Both need excellent clinical care, but their emotional needs, expectations, and sense of control may be very different. We have to diagnose those needs, too.

Every patient arrives with what we call an expectation packet. It contains what they anticipate, hope for, and worry about during the encounter. Those expectations may be accurate or inaccurate, reasonable or unreasonable. But they should never be ignored.

How do you diagnose them? Start by asking two questions:

• What’s the most important thing we can do to make this an exceptional experience?
• What is your biggest fear or concern?

The answers may surprise you. A patient preparing for surgery may be more worried about who will care for a spouse at home than about the procedure itself. Knowing that changes how we approach the conversation.

Patient or customer? It depends. Patients are always both, but the balance changes throughout their care. We use a tool called the Patient-CustoMeter™ to help clinicians recognize this distinction.

The more acutely ill and dependent someone is, the more that person needs our technical expertise and clinical judgment. As the person recovers and becomes more independent, choices, information, and control become increasingly important.

Consider someone recovering from knee replacement surgery. Immediately after surgery, the priorities include managing pain and preventing complications. As recovery progresses, the patient may become more concerned about mobility, independence, and getting home.

The clinical diagnosis hasn’t necessarily changed, but the patient-experience diagnosis has. That’s why we encourage clinicians to ask themselves: Has this person’s patient-customer balance shifted today?

Give patients back some power and control. Illness often takes away a person’s sense of control. Healthcare processes can unintentionally take away even more. One of the most effective ways to personalize care is to restore appropriate control whenever possible.

That might mean involving patients in choosing among clinically appropriate treatments, sharing laboratory or imaging results in ways they can understand, or keeping them informed about what must happen before discharge.

These aren’t simply nice gestures. They help patients participate in their care, understand what comes next, and feel less powerless.

For leaders, the practical challenge is to teach these skills deliberately. Use real patient scenarios in team meetings. Ask staff how the patient-experience diagnosis might differ from the clinical diagnosis. Discuss how patients’ needs change during an encounter and what choices or information might help restore their sense of control.

The future of healthcare will certainly involve more sophisticated technology. But technology alone cannot tell us what matters most to the person in front of us. We need to ask. We need to recognize when their needs change. And we need to respond accordingly.

These skills can be taught, practiced, and reinforced. And when we get them right, we make healthcare better for patients and easier for the people who care for them.

Join Thom Mayer at Rewiring Healthcare: Foundation to Future, October 20–21 in Nashville. His October 21 session, Leading Healthcare Into the Future: Creating a More Personalized Patient Experience, will explore how healthcare leaders can embrace innovation while keeping human connection at the center of care. To learn more and register, click here.