Imagine: After several days of apprehension and many sleepless nights, the appointment you’ve dreaded has arrived. Years of needle phobia topped with too many experiences that lacked patient comfort measures, like topical anesthetic spray for injections beforehand, have left you fearful and stressed for even routine visits. You follow your orthopedist’s friendly office assistant into a brightly-lit examination room smelling of disinfectant, and reluctantly remove your jacket. Your ailing shoulder is exposed, and now you’re one step closer.
“Doctor Jones will be with you shortly,” the staff member says. She closes the door as she disappears into the hall.
You begin to feel the familiar rush of anxiety. It starts in the pit of your stomach, and spreads up through your shaking hands. “Not again,” you say to yourself as you fight to suppress the overwhelming panic. Your throat becomes tight and your thoughts become fogged.
As a child life specialist, when you’re called to a patient’s room, you never know what awaits on the other side of the door. In some cases, your services are needed to help calm the nerves of a toddler before she receives a vaccine. In other cases, you may walk in to find a hysterical child and his equally terrified parents. Sometimes you can bring a situation under control in a matter of minutes, but some take much, much longer.
For private practice office managers, hiring and recruiting is a time-consuming, expensive and, quite frankly, frustrating endeavor. From finding the right talent, to ensuring new hires are properly trained, getting the right employees in place requires a great deal of business resources. Not to mention, it’s pricey. It costs 20 percent of a worker’s $50,000 salary to replace them, according to the 
Most of us are accustomed to seeing customer experience surveys from businesses like cable companies, retailers and automotive service centers. Days after you’ve purchased a product or paid for a service, you’ve probably received an email or automated phone call asking you to rank your satisfaction and share your comments. For many years, businesses have relied on customer feedback to measure success and improve processes. Today, however, you’ll begin seeing surveys from an unlikely source: your hospital.
