Learn to give patients what they really want

Discover most critical factors in patient satisfaction

Do your patients care whether you give them a choice of eggs or pancakes for breakfast? Would they go to another hospital if you quit offering an open visitation policy? Would you attract more patients if you sped up the admissions process?

A new book shows you how to find out.

Customer-Inspired Quality: Looking Backward Through the Telescope, written by James G. Shaw, shows managers step-by-step how to determine the way their customers define a quality version of a product or service. The book then provides a guide to implementing process improvements that lead to quantifiably better quality.

"You don’t want to waste your time improving something that customers find unimportant," he adds. "You want to focus on those areas that allow the organization to be more flexible and responsive to customer needs and desires and to do so in a way that allows you to measure quality improvements."

The book includes charts and examples from a variety of industries, including healthcare organizations which have been challenged by the marketplace to pay more attention to patient satisfaction while cutting costs.