What's the difference between patient engagement, experience and quality? Here's how the Chief Experience Officer at the Cleveland Clinic sees it:

Here's my view:

1. I agree that patient engagement is “actions individuals must take to obtain the greatest benefit from the health care services available to them.”
2. However, engagement starts with education and is a means towards an end-behavior change. Without that, it is a cost. There are many stakeholder engagement models to use. Here's one example. The idea is to move people from awareness to intention to decision to action to advocacy.
3. Physician engagement and experience is as important as patient engagement and experience. Happy doctors make happy patients.
4. Engagement is ultimately the responsibility of the patient and doctor that can be assisted by those who provide care or influence physician behavior.
5. Providing a sick care experience that exceeds the expectations of doctors and patients is the responsibility of those people who provide the care , its processes and the environments where it is delivered.
6. In most instances, unless there is meaningful behavior change, engagement and experience have little or no correlation with quality of care. Here is the business case for improving the primary care experience entrepreneurship.
7. Experience, engagement and quality of care require separate metrics and KPIs that are separate and distinct from ecommerce or digital marketing metrics.
8. There is no consistent agreement on how to define and measure the 3 domains.
9. While behavioral economics has provided us with insights into what makes people do what they do and think how they think, there are significant gaps in its application in sick care.
10. Patient comsumerism is a myth.
11. Patients and doctors value different things.
12. For patients, conveniencecare trumps value based care.
13. The sick care defense is rarely mano a mano. Now it is a care team taking care working with a patient care community. What about their experience?
14. Here is the business case for doctor and patient experience innovation.
15. Treat doctors like customers.

Value is always user defined. There is a term for features that don't add user defined benefits-COST. The goal is not to make the average care experience better. The goal is to make the high value care experience better. Just OK quality is not OK even if the experience is great.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs and Twitter@ArlenMD.