5 Proven Ways to Improve Patient Experience in Healthcare

By Guillermo Fernandez-Tremblay, Patient Experience Technology Specialist, July 1st, 2025

For patients, a positive experience is no longer limited to the quality of care they receive - it’s about the entire journey throughout their care pathway.

Nowadays, the patient’s voice has become an essential strategic lever for healthcare organizations. It allows them to gather key insights directly from the source, helping improve internal processes and, above all, the patient experience and quality of care.

In this article, the patient experience specialists at Lime share 5 reliable and proven methods to improve patient experience in your healthcare facility.

1. Measure the Patient Experience Using Specialized Tools Like PREMs

First, what are PREMs?

PREMs (Patient-Reported Experience Measures) are specialized digital tools used in healthcare to measure and report care experiences from the patient's perspective, particularly the quality of the overall care journey.

They enable healthcare facility managers to involve patients in improving care pathways by easily identifying both strengths and blind spots in the patient journey, helping to uncover actionable areas for improvement.

Integrating PREMs enables a data-driven approach to enhance the patient experience. It provides concrete insights that support informed and effective decision-making.

Why use PREMs in your healthcare facility?

Already recognized as a standardized tool for improving patient experience and quality of care, PREMs offer several key advantages:

• ✅ They provide patient-centered data reflecting the actual patient experience lived within a healthcare facility, which may differ significantly from the perceptions of clinical staff and management teams.
• ✅ They serve as a decision-making tool for healthcare managers, using the results presented to adjust practices and continuous improvement actions.
• ✅ They strengthen patient trust and engagement by showing patients that their opinions matter and their feedback is considered.

How your healthcare facility can use PREMs to improve the patient experience

PREMs are specialized digital solutions, such as the one developed by Lime specifically for measuring patient experience. Once your facility is equipped with a PREMs solution, the system:

• ➡️ Regularly collects targeted and systematic feedback at key moments of the care journey – such as consultations, hospital stays, or procedures – through a digital form sent to patients. This helps capture a clear and representative picture of their experience.
• ➡️ Deeply analyzes the collected data and results to identify trends, critical pain points, and differences between departments or care teams.
• ➡️ Supports informed decision-making and concrete actions based on real patient feedback. This allows teams to implement targeted improvement plans, whether it's training staff on specific topics, optimizing certain processes, or enhancing existing infrastructures.

Concrete example of how PREMs can be used to improve a healthcare service

After reviewing data collected through PREMs, a hospital identifies recurring patient dissatisfaction related to its blood test service. A lack of information about the procedure generated questions and anxiety among many patients.

In response, the hospital assigns a dedicated staff member at the reception desk and creates clear, informative handouts that are displayed to better guide and reassure patients coming in for this service.

2. Measure Actual Health Outcomes with PROMs

What are PROMs?

Unlike PREMs, which measure the patient’s experience, PROMs (Patient-Reported Outcome Measures) are digital tools that measure clinical outcomes as perceived by the patients. We’re talking about patient engagement.

Integrating PROMs into clinical practice allows healthcare professionals to better understand the real impact of treatments from the patient's perspective.

Like PREMs, PROMs are typically delivered in the form of questionnaires, enabling patients to share information about their health status, symptoms, quality of life, or functional capacity following a procedure or a medical appointment.

This approach places patients at the center of clinical evaluation by taking into account their perspective on the effectiveness of treatments and their health outcomes over time.

Why use PROMs in your healthcare facility?

PROMs not only offer valuable insight into the perceived effectiveness of care, they also serve to:

• ✅ Strengthen personalized care for each patient by allowing treatment to be adjusted based on how the patient perceives their own progress.
• ✅ Complement objective medical data, helping providers make better-informed clinical decisions.
• ✅ Identify what truly impacts a patient’s daily life, supporting initiatives that aim to improve overall quality of life.

How to use PROMs to boost patient engagement (and enhance their experience)

Just like Lime’s dedicated platform, PROMs are tailored digital tools that help healthcare teams better understand patient outcomes. Once your healthcare facility is equipped with a PROMs system, here’s how to make the most of it:

• ➡️ Integrate PROMs collection into the care pathway, by sending questionnaires to patients before, during, and after procedures or treatments. This allows for continuous tracking of patient health outcomes over time.
• ➡️ Analyze and interpret the results via the PROMs platform to uncover unmet patient needs, side effects, or expected improvements. These insights support personalized updates to clinical protocols and care strategies within your facility.

A concrete example of care adjustment using PROMs

In a rheumatology department, for instance, patients regularly complete a PROMs questionnaire focused on pain levels and mobility.

If the results show a decline in the patient’s condition, the medical team can quickly adjust the treatment plan — for example, by prescribing targeted physiotherapy sessions — without waiting for the next in-person appointment.

This proactive approach not only improves patient well-being but also helps reduce response times and delays in care.

3. Train Your Teams in Empathetic Communication

Trust as a cornerstone of the patient journey

Trust between a patient and the clinical team is a key predictor of satisfaction, treatment adherence, and long-term engagement with the healthcare system.

It’s a strategic component of the overall patient experience, one that also benefits the healthcare team as a whole:

• ✅ Trust leads to greater adherence to treatment plans recommended by healthcare professionals.
• ✅ A strong caregiver-patient relationship enables more effective and fluid communication between both parties.
• ✅ Patients who trust their care team are less likely to file complaints or claims, which can help reduce organizational stress and workload.

Techniques and micro-behaviors to include in your team training

To build trust with patients, healthcare professionals must practice active listening, clearly explain treatments, and above all, treat each patient as a true partner in their care journey.

Establishing strong trust between patients and the care team also requires involvement from healthcare facility administration. Here are a few practical actions you can take:

• ➡️ Identify and structure key communication moments throughout the patient journey – for example, at admission or during post-operative follow-ups.
  Communication tools like predefined scripts can help guide both clinical and administrative staff on how to respond appropriately in common, high-stress situations – such as long wait times or when patients feel unheard or frustrated.
• ➡️ Strengthen interprofessional and relational practices to ensure trust and mutual respect become embedded in your health organization’s culture.
• ➡️ Raise awareness among teams about the impact of words and actions – for instance, by making sure patients fully understand the information shared with them, and avoiding overly technical medical jargon.

4. Reduce Pain Points in the Care Journey to Create a Smoother Patient Experience

Use patient feedback to identify friction points (wait times, confusion, coordination issues)

Thanks to patient feedback — such as responses to PREMs and PROMs — healthcare managers can more easily identify specific pain points in the care journey and pinpoint when and where they occur.

Here are a few key elements to consider during your analysis:

• ➡️ PREMs are your best ally in identifying pain points in the care pathway, as they give patients a voice and reveal the experience from their perspective.
• ➡️ Examine the entire care journey — Patients go through every step of the care journey, and their feedback offers a unique view that helps providers and managers identify critical gaps and inefficiencies.

Turn patient feedback into actionable improvements

Once you’ve identified where and why the pain points occur, your facility will be able to make informed recommendations to optimize both the patient journey and their overall experience.

Here are a few ways to move forward:

• ➡️ Map the patient journey using data collected from PREMs to visually identify where pain points arise. This map can then be enhanced with corrective actions and process improvements.
• ➡️ Segment the patient journey by level to guide targeted actions:
  Micro level (clinical level) :
  Care teams can directly adjust their practices based on patient feedback – for example, by improving communication or providing explanatory handouts.
  Meso level (organizational level) :
  Recurring patterns can be identified and used to rethink standard care pathways. Dashboards and reporting tools can support deeper analysis and continuous improvement.
• ➡️ Track progress over time to evaluate whether the changes made to the care journey are truly improving the patient experience.

5. Personalize the Care Journey Through a Patient-Centered Approach (VBHC)

Patient-perceived value (VBHC) at the core of experience improvement

Value-Based Healthcare (VBHC) focuses on delivering care that achieves outcomes that truly matter to patients and their families – such as improved quality of life, restored independence, or emotional well-being.

Healthcare organizations that embrace VBHC quickly see a positive impact on both perceived value and patient experience:

• ✅ Reducing unnecessary or redundant procedures helps focus efforts on the most meaningful interventions.
• ✅ Optimizing resource use makes care pathways more efficient and cost-effective.
• ✅ Healthcare professionals find greater purpose in their work, seeing the real-life benefits care brings to patients.

How to apply the VBHC approach to improve the patient experience

A VBHC-based care journey relies heavily on patient feedback, enabling care teams to assess the impact of their actions and focus on what truly matters to patients.

• ➡️ Personalize care pathways based on recurring patient values and preferences to create standardized yet meaningful care journeys that enhance the overall experience.
• ➡️ Use patient feedback to actively involve patients in co-designing their own care pathway – making them feel seen, heard, and genuinely involved in the process.
• ➡️ Pay special attention to key moments in the care journey that provide the most perceived value, so you can maximize impact where it matters most.

Patient’s Voice to Guide Continuous Improvement in Healthcare

By leveraging innovative digital tools like PREMs and PROMs, healthcare organizations can build a culture grounded in trust and listening, turning every patient interaction into an opportunity for meaningful improvement.

Placing patient's voice at the heart of decision-making means advancing healthcare quality toward what truly matters: meaningful health outcomes and a better care experience.

Find out how Lime's patient experience (PREMs) and patient engagement (PROMs) solutions can contribute to continuous improvement in your healthcare facility.