The Hospitality Deficit in Healthcare

Growing competition in the hospitality industry forced astute practitioners to discover and embrace better ways to reach, engage, and serve customers. This awareness led the most successful providers to develop comprehensive profiles of customers’ preferences and consumption habits which, in turn, enabled them to anticipate evolving customer needs and desires, offer more innovative product/service options, recognize and reward customers for their patronage and, ultimately, achieve enviable customer satisfaction. Can the same be said about healthcare, an industry that shares many common service touchpoints? The authors theorized otherwise based on their collective experience working with a variety of hospitality providers and two prominent healthcare providers. Their research revealed the existence of several “hospitality deficits” in the delivery of healthcare: service interventions respondents rated significantly lower in healthcare than in hospitality. The authors developed a management model designed to enable healthcare providers to address these deficits in practice, then offer recommendations on how principles of hospitality may be adopted by healthcare providers to improve the patient experience.