Conventional thinking has long held that most patients base their choice of hospital on its clinical reputation, its location, or their physicians’ recommendations. Recently, though, hospital executives in the United States have begun recognizing that patients also consider nonclinical factors, such as comfortable rooms and convenient registration procedures, when choosing where to seek treatment.

New McKinsey research underscores just how important nonclinical factors have become. An online survey of more than 2,000 US patients with commercial insurance or Medicare about their attitudes toward the patient’s experience¹ revealed that most of them are willing to switch hospitals for better service and amenities and that many have already asked their physicians to refer them to specific facilities. We also surveyed more than 100 physicians (split evenly between general practitioners and specialists) to find out how much they agree with their patients in these matters. The survey revealed that doctors are often willing to accommodate a patient’s request for a referral to a hospital that offers a positive experience—sometimes even when it doesn’t have the best clinical reputation among the alternatives.

Few hospitals act systematically to understand what patients value in the nonclinical aspects of their hospital visits or how and when hospitals should invest to meet their expectations. Most hospital executives believe that it is enough to address the experience of patients by measuring and raising their satisfaction and resolving their complaints.

Hospitals need to do more. Our research indicates that hospitals generate most of their profit margins from commercially insured patients, the very ones who are most likely to weigh nonclinical aspects of visits to care facilities when choosing them.² As competition for commercial patients intensifies,³ hospitals must move beyond fixing problems and retaining patients, by building a reputation for superior service or amenities that will attract new patients. Many of these services and amenities will be novel; indeed, hospitals generally don’t offer most of those we asked patients to rate, such as guarantees of punctuality and personalized billing assistance.

Since it won’t be easy to buy or quickly replicate a distinctive patient experience, knowing how to create one should yield a sustainable competitive edge that will grow in importance as clinical scores rise and become more comparable across hospitals.⁴ Delaying investments, by contrast, will put patient volumes at risk.