The patient experience and Matt Haughey

Matt Haughey's description of his "adventure in brain tumors" is worth reading. Matt is well-known as the founder of MetaFilter, one of the most successful and vibrant online communities ever created, and well-loved as an all-around good and positive person (which comes through in the experience of using MetaFilter).

Matt's story about his hospital visit is instructive on two levels. First, his experience mirrors what is said all too often about the hospital patient experience: medical staff, even if capable and effective, don't create an efficient or especially comfortable environment. Matt's description is amazingly clear, given how recent the events were when he wrote this:

The days in the hospital didn't go by so much as a blur as they did a smear. I was either asleep, passed out and seizing, lethargic, and very briefly completely awake each day as an army of medical professionals grilled me with a couple dozen identical questions and eventually life altering decisions were presented to me when I had been awake for all of 30 seconds.

I came away from this experience feeling the OHSU hospital in Portland continues to impress me with its amazing staff, but that the process of dealing with patients could be done in a more efficient manner. I know they all sort of kept an internal log of my story but to constantly be asked the same things by different groups of people and then not know who is your main decision maker was a challenge. Given my state of sickness and exhaustion, I felt like what an elderly man might feel like in the medical system. I had trouble understanding what people were saying as they woke me from sleep, I was constantly poked and prodded without descriptions of what results entailed, I literally wanted to "phone a friend" when those surgeons asked me in the early morning hours what I wanted to do.

The other takeaway from Matt's "adventure" is the role social media played. Anil Dash invited the Twitter universe to post nice things about Matt with the hashtag #matthowielove and over a thousand people quickly typed up posts. (As I said, Matt is well-known and well-loved, a potent combination!) Matt writes about his experience seeing the posts on Twitter:

It was all quite a surprise and I felt awed and loved and supported by everyone's good thoughts and kindness towards me. As I shut my laptop I feel like I just crowd-surfed the entire internet as they held me high above and as cliched as that sounds it was a very good feeling to sleep to.

Very few people could command a thousand get-well messages on Twitter, but it's worth noting that social media can be a real force for healing... especially in challenging environments like a hospital room.

It also raises an interesting question: If you were head of quality-of-care for a major hospital, which would you invest in - improving the efficiency and empathy delivered by clinical staff, or improving your patients' access and exposure to social media during their visit? Of course it's not an either-or decision, but worth considering the relative merits of those two elements of Matt's experience.

(These are some of the issues we explored at Gel Health, by the way.)

• Nov 16, 2009
• IN: Customer Experience
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