What does a patient experience consultant do?
I walk one kind of patient visit from end to end with the people who run it, and fix the steps where patients wait, repeat themselves, or get lost. The visit starts on a phone, when someone searches for you, and ends when the last bill is paid. Most of what frustrates patients sits outside the exam room: booking, directions, parking, forms, the wait, and billing. Those fixes are usually cheap, and nobody on staff owns all of them, which is why they stay broken.
Where does AI help a clinic, and where should it stay out?
AI helps in the paperwork around care: reminders, rescheduling, intake forms filled once and reused, routine questions after hours, and sorting the inbox. It stays out of anything clinical, and out of any moment where a patient needs to feel heard by a person. The test I use at each step of the visit: if this goes wrong, does a patient get hurt or feel ignored? If yes, a person does it.
How do you keep patient data safe in this work?
The first projects sit where there is no patient data at all: scheduling rules, directions, form design, staff training, the website, and the policy itself. Anything that touches patient information goes only into tools your compliance officer has approved, from a vendor that will sign a business associate agreement. I am not a HIPAA attorney, and your compliance people have the final word. A one-page AI policy is $750 and gives staff a rule they can follow without calling anyone.
Do you work with medical device companies?
Yes. I did service design and UX research for Medtronic, and 3M's healthcare work on the agency side. Device teams usually need research: watching nurses and clinicians use the product in a real room, then changing the product, the training, or the words on the screen. That work runs as a fixed study price or monthly by the day.
What does it cost to start?
A one-hour second opinion is $150. A service design workshop on one visit type starts at $3,500, and two days with the maps written up is $6,500. A one-page AI policy is $750. Anything over $3,000 can be paid by the month, and community clinics run as nonprofits can ask for the sliding scale.