The five shifts needed to launch a hospital abroad

The NHS is under huge financial pressure. At the same time, the government – in the form of Healthcare UK and the Department for International Trade – are asking Trusts to generate more revenue from exports abroad. Clearly they’ve read Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index and know the power of the NHS brand, both at home and abroad.

This makes current healthcare trends in consumerism even more relevant to the NHS. With the rise of digital technology, consumers have unprecedented power. Consumers expect business categories like retail and consumer goods to provide individual experiences across both the physical and digital worlds. Healthcare providers are not exempt from these expectations, and consumer expectations are rising around the world.

Through our work on consumerism in healthcare, Prophet has identified five key shifts organisations need to make to succeed in this increasingly consumerist environment. We validated these shifts and their relation to healthcare export by talking to executives at leading NHS organisations – such as Moorfields and King’s Hospitals – who have successfully launched hospitals abroad. We also spoke to leaders of organisations – such as GE Healthcare and OCS Healthcare – who have supported these hospitals as they launch.

These conversations highlight some of the key things to bear in mind when launching abroad, but also show the great potential to learn from the experience. In a series of posts in coming weeks, we’ll look at each of the five shifts in turn and explore a case study of how a hospital made that move successfully. Today we’re looking at the first shift.

Shift 1: From Tactical Fixes to an Experience Strategy

While healthcare organisations often start by enhancing consumer experiences in one-off initiatives (i.e., reducing waiting room times), launching abroad means they have the opportunity to optimise the entire healthcare journey as a strategic priority. Doing so requires establishing a vision for the organisation, hiring the right leaders, and creating an experiential plan to change and win with consumers.

When King’s Hospital first launched in the Middle East, this was a major learning. Patients came into the clinic accompanied by members of their family – significantly more people entered the consulting room than the hospital was used to dealing with in the UK. Initially, doctors were concerned about patient confidentiality, before realising that they needed to shift their understanding of what confidentiality meant to patients.

“When designing the patient experience you have to understand how to define what good care is. It’s a different patient experience to the UK because they’re not the same patients,” said Peter Brooks, Co-chair of King’s College Hospital Clinics Ethics Committee. The hospital shifted their mission statement in response to patient behaviour. “We talked about care not just for patients, but for patients and their families. It was utterly transformative.”

The new King’s facility, in Dubai, has further built on this learning and has developed an extremely comprehensive patient experience strategy. Carol Rose, the Chief Nursing Officer for King’s College in the UAE describes how every single patient touchpoint has been carefully designed. “At every touchpoint with a staff member, someone will receive the same level of service. It doesn’t matter if it’s the concierge when you get out of your car, the housekeeper on the ward when you come back from surgery or the CEO – everyone is expected to give the same extraordinary experience to patients.”

Recruitment strategies have focused on finding people who have the right attitude and skills to provide high-touch hospitality. Training programmes and scripts have been developed to teach everyone how to interact with the patients. King’s has special staff members – King’s Men – to escort patients around the hospital, and digital touchpoints also enable patients to see  what staff are doing to deliver the best care possible.

“At every point along the patient journey there is an awful lot more visible interaction taking place from all members of the team,” says Rose. This extends even to aftercare, where take-home reports have been carefully designed to educate patients. King’s overall experience strategy means it is shifting the bar for patients, and able to set standards that competitors may struggle to beat.

To get started on this shift, five questions can help organisations think through their patient experience strategy in another country. They are meaty topics and some may require significant levels of research and on-the-ground experience, but establishing clarity at an early stage means the hospital is much better prepared and is a better guarantor of success in the long-run.

1. What is our overall mission, and does it need to be adapted for the local context?
2.  Who are our target patients, and what do they define as high-quality care?
3. Where do we want to differentiate from competitors, and where is it okay to be at parity?
4. What tools, skills, capabilities and processes do we need to enable this differentiation to happen?
5. How will we integrate physical and intangible experiences across the patient journey, so that they work together to reflect our greater mission?