Fabulous Kaiser Permanente Customer Service

Today I received Kaiser Permanente healthcare service for the first time. For over two decades I worked for a west coast healthcare management company so naturally went to the hospital and doctors where I worked. While I worked at one place that whole time, I did get services at multiple facilities. I no longer work there and today was my first foray into a new healthcare system as a patient.

I have NEVER experienced the fabulous quality of service in my life that I experienced today. Not even close. 

I’ve had back pain for over two weeks after moving a bunch of stuff, which is definitely out of the ordinary for me. I figured I should go to a doctor to make sure I didn’t have a herniated disc or something serious (I don’t).

This morning I set up my on-line account to make an electronic reservation but it gave me a month out so I phoned, sure that I could get in sooner. That is when Kaiser’s superior service level started. A gal named Carol got me an appointment only four hours from the time I called. However, not only was she VERY polite, she was also very empathetic, even saying she was sorry my first encounter with Kaiser had to be due to back pain. I was impressed, but figured I’d just happened to hit on an unusually nice person. Fortunately that was just the beginning.

Imagine my pleasant surprise when every person I encountered gave me the same polite, cheerful, and helpful service. From the registration personnel to the people giving me directions to the next department I needed to go to.

The second amazing thing was my typical wait time was only a few minutes. I went to three departments and the longest wait was about five minutes. I showed up 45 minutes early to my appointment and thus figured I’d have a VERY long wait until I saw the Doctor, but I was taken right away when I got there and whisked through everything I encountered. The Dr decided I should go see a couple other departments, one of them being Radiology to get an EKG (unrelated to the back pain…!). At my prior work place I’d have had to schedule the EKG instead of just walking up and even then would likely have had a 30-60 minute wait.

Based on my experience with my prior healthcare system, I had a rough idea of how long I’d have to wait and I can guarantee you I would not have been seen before my appointment time. In fact, I’d have been happy if I saw the Dr a half hour after my scheduled appointment time. Instead, at that same half hour mark I had in mind I was walking out to my truck, having visited two departments I never expected to visit.

Kaiser is absolutely huge compared to the couple dozen facilities where I was before. You’d think they’d have more problems with teaching people good attitude and quickly moving through each stop. Even the signage and layout is far superior to anything I’ve encountered before.

On top of that, every department knew I was coming when I arrived, I didn’t have to give the same information more than once anywhere and I didn’t have to fill out a long form about my medical history even though this was my first visit. The Dr just asked a few questions and quickly keyed basic information into the Electronic Medical Record. We had an EMR at the place I worked at before by the same vendor (Epic Systems), but new patients still had to fill out lengthy forms by hand and give the same information nearly everywhere you went.

This experience of no-wait time, never giving the same info more than once and rapid movement through the system was considered an impossible to achieve holy grail at my last employer where patient complaints on these issues were constant. I’m going to have some interesting conversations with some of my old cronies when I see them.

I am beyond impressed. Blown away. My hat is off to Dr. Desai and all of the staff at the Vallejo, CA facility. You ALL are amazing. Most of all, there are people somewhere, behind the scenes from a patient point of view, that have figured out how to produce the positive patient experience I had today. Congrats to them.

This entry was posted on March 26, 2009 at 9:08 pm and is filed under All. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

| Print