Patient Experience: From Cleveland Clinic to Mexican Hospitals

A few weeks ago, sitting in an IPADE classroom, I caught myself thinking: I’ve seen this movie before. Not in Ohio, not in an American case study, but in Mexico’s private hospitals.

A patient shows up without an appointment. He’s upset, loud, and honestly … scared. Security is hovering. The front desk is trying to de-escalate. Someone from leadership gets a call. The physician is already thinking about clinical risk and liability. Everyone’s on edge because everyone knows how quickly a moment like this can spiral.

In the Cleveland Clinic case, that patient is “Bob Jones.” The person who steps into the lobby is Dr. James Merlino, a colorectal surgeon who also served as chief experience officer. And the question on the table is uncomfortable in its simplicity: Do you “fire” a patient who is noncompliant and abusive, or do you keep treating him even if it drags down satisfaction scores and burns out your team?

It’s a hard story because it’s not theoretical. It’s human. And it forces a question hospitals don’t always say out loud: Is patient experience a nice-to-have, or is it part of the care model itself?

Cleveland Clinic learned this the uncomfortable way. Their CEO at the time, Dr. Delos Cosgrove, believed outcomes were the real differentiator. Then he heard a story at Harvard that challenged that assumption: a physician chose Mayo Clinic over Cleveland Clinic for heart surgery, largely because of expectations around communication and the overall experience before and after surgery, even though Cleveland Clinic’s program was ranked higher.

That moment reframed the definition of quality. Outcomes matter. But the experience across the entire journey matters too: scheduling, arrival, uncertainty, discharge, and then the part nobody controls inside the building: the patient at home trying to make sense of everything.

Now, bring that back to our reality.

Mexico’s private hospitals don’t need to copy Cleveland Clinic. We need to translate the principle.

Patient experience is not hospitality. It’s strategy.

In Mexico’s private hospital sector, patient experience often gets treated like a hospitality layer: nicer waiting rooms, better coffee, better signage, friendlier greetings. That helps. But it doesn’t address the real drivers of experience, the things that shape trust, adherence, and outcomes:

• Delays and uncertainty
• Fragmented communication across departments and physicians
• Patients arriving unprepared because instructions were unclear (or never delivered)
• Families acting as care coordinators, without tools
• Discharge that ends the relationship and begins the confusion
• A system that sees the patient in episodes, while the patient lives health 24/7

Changing the Conversation

When you treat patient experience as infrastructure, the conversation changes. It’s no longer about “being nicer.” It’s about designing reliability, trust, and continuity into the way care is delivered.

Cleveland Clinic operationalized this through an Office of Patient Experience, training programs, dashboards, ombudsman roles, advisory councils, and practical interventions aimed at setting expectations and improving communication.

What I find most powerful is that a lot of the improvements were not expensive. One example: When they began posting and explaining experience scores to nursing teams, communication and reputation improved. Not because people suddenly cared more but because the feedback became visible, concrete, and actionable.

Mexico’s private hospitals can apply that lesson immediately: Patient experience improves when teams can see it, own it, and learn from it in real time.

The part we underestimate: Patient experience is already tied to revenue.

In the private sector, patients do choose. Word of mouth spreads fast: WhatsApp screenshots, Facebook groups, short videos, family recommendations. The first interaction is often digital, long before anyone touches a stethoscope.

And even beyond private care, experience shows up as trust, adherence, and continuity. When people don’t trust the system, they arrive late. They abandon treatment. They hop between providers. They self-medicate. Then they come back — sicker, more complex, more expensive to treat.

Either way, patient experience becomes a financial variable. If you don’t manage it, it manages you.

From Buzzwords to Practicalities

From facility-based care to distributed care: where experience becomes the bridge. This is where innovation and healthtech stop being buzzwords and become practical.

Hospitals in our country are still built around facility-based care. That’s where the workflows live. That’s where the revenue is booked. That’s what teams are trained to optimize. But the patient journey is already distributed. It happens at home, in traffic, at work, with family, on a phone, between appointments, after discharge.

Patient experience is the bridge between those two worlds, and digital tools are how you scale that bridge.

Three digital plays that turn patient experience into a real advantage:

1. The digital front door, built as an experience strategy. This goes far beyond “online appointments.” It’s about reducing friction and anxiety before the visit.

• Clear service lines and pathways
• Smart intake and pre-registration
• Preparation instructions people can actually follow
• Transparent packages where appropriate
• Financial orientation and payment options
• Navigation: where to go, what to bring, what happens next

Every one of those elements reduces no-shows, confusion, and waiting — and improves conversion.

2. Post-visit continuity, built as a safety strategy
   Most harm in healthcare is not dramatic. It’s quiet. It’s misunderstanding. It’s poor follow-up. It’s a patient who didn’t know which symptom mattered, who didn’t know who to contact, or who didn’t feel safe asking questions.

Continuity doesn’t need to be complicated:

• Discharge instructions in plain language
• A structured follow-up message: what to watch for, what is normal, what is not
• Care navigation for complex cases
• Medication education
• Short virtual touchpoints
• Clear escalation protocols for red flags

Cleveland Clinic tested expectation-setting materials (“What to Expect During Your Hospital Stay”) and improved multiple patient experience dimensions.

Mexico’s private hospitals can do this using channels patients already use, as long as it’s designed with empathy and clarity.

3. Patient data, used as a learning strategy that enables new business models
   When you connect clinical data with operational and engagement data, you start to understand patients beyond the episode.

• Who drops off after discharge and why
• Which service lines naturally lead to repeat needs
• What patients value in communication
• Where the bottlenecks live in the journey
• What “good outcomes” look like from the patient’s perspective, not only the clinician’s

That understanding unlocks new business models: 

• Membership programs for prevention and chronic care
• Bundled pathways that include recovery, not only the procedures
• Employer programs tied to continuity and navigation
• Home-based extensions for selected conditions
• Digital programs that turn post-discharge into a product, not a loose end

Lifetime Value

In simple terms, you move from episodic revenue to lifetime value built on trust.

A pragmatic proposal: start with a patient experience operating system

If I had to propose an approach that fits Mexico’s private hospital reality, without a Cleveland Clinic budget, it would look like this:

1. Define the non-negotiables
   Pick five things every patient should consistently feel: clarity, respect, timely updates, ownership, and safe discharge. Make them operational, not aspirational.
2. Measure the journey
   Choose a small set of journey metrics: time to appointment, visibility into wait time, comprehension of discharge instructions, follow-up completion, and a simple “would you recommend” question. Make them visible weekly.
3. Build two cross-functional squads
   One squad owns “front door” friction (access, scheduling, intake).
   One squad owns “aftercare” continuity (discharge, follow-up, navigation).
   Give them authority and a 90-day deliverable.
4. Deploy lightweight digital layers
   Don’t start with a massive transformation program. Start with what patients actually touch: pre-visit prep, post-visit follow-up, and a safe channel for questions.
5. Train empathy as a skill
   Cleveland Clinic’s turning point included a direct question about empathy. Empathy can be trained as communication, expectation setting, and service recovery. It’s culture, and it’s process.

Here are three questions hospital leaders should ask this quarter:

1. Where does the patient feel the most uncertainty in our journey, and how do we reduce it?
2. Which part of our experience is harming adherence and driving avoidable complications?
3. What would we build if we treated post-discharge continuity as a core product, not an administrative task?

If you can answer those, you’re already treating patient experience as infrastructure. That is where the shift starts.

Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely my own and are provided for informational purposes only. They do not represent the views, positions, or official policies of TCA Software Solutions (or any of its affiliates). David Potes