What Swiss patients expect from the hospital of the future

Each year, international representatives from the hospital sector and the real estate industry get together at the Swiss Immohealthcare Congress. The 12th congress was held on September 15 and 16, 2020, under the leadership of Moritz Schönleber (Euroforum/ Handelsblatt Media Group).

The congress highlighted the challenges that Switzerland’s hospitals face – particularly in terms of the digital transformation. The blazing speed of technological development stands in contrast to the fixed infrastructures and sluggish planning processes used for medical real estate. Healthcare facilities frequently go through a planning process that takes more than 10 years. By the time the hospital is completed, it is outdated. The interests of many different stakeholders have to be taken into consideration: The commissioners of the project, representatives of the operating processes and employees, government officials and political leaders, construction law, financing, planners, builders and urban development – the patient rarely figures in this equation.

A few remarkable success stories illustrate the difference that the inclusion of patients into the planning process at an early stage can make:

• The Sheba Medical Center in Israel, one of the world’s very best hospitals, systematically puts patients at the center of its activities. It includes them from the very start by using co-creation and design-thinking approaches and lets them set the pace of their digital journey.
• During the expansion of the Swiss Paraplegic Center in Nottwil, the architecture was viewed as a product. The focus of the work was always placed on patient benefit. The patient path was analyzed in an agile, participatory planning process, among other things. This served as a basis for the iterative planning of individual operational processes.
• The University Hospital Zurich, which is planning one of Europe’s largest acute-care facilities at Zurich Airport, stresses that patient orientation is a question of a hospital’s culture. Under this approach, patients are viewed as «customers.» These customers should increasingly become the hospital’s focus in terms of service, transparency, convenience and, above all, «customer experience.»

Stefan Reiser, a member of the management team of the LINK, showed in the representative study «Patient Centricity – What patients expect from healthcare real estate» that the examples of innovation presented at the congress are hardly the norm among Swiss hospitals. Two-thirds of Swiss hospital patients and visitors said they were satisfied only to an average degree or dissatisfied with the hospital with which they had had contact. He described the «customer journey» of a patient from beginning to end. With the help of seven pillars of success, he pointed out the areas where Swiss hospitals could focus more closely on the needs of their patients.

Because every hospital has its own needs, he called for patients and visitors to be incorporated into planning processes at an early stage, for constant patient feedback to be sought and for a hospital’s image to be regularly and self-critically analyzed. He said the key was to do this work in the correct way, that is, by applying a methodology that avoids raising unreasonable expectations («everything is important») and also takes unconscious biases and behavior patterns into consideration.