The Human Experience: Why Chick-Fil-A Could Drive Your Patient Experience

If you’ve been in healthcare for even a small while you are probably familiar with Cleveland Clinic’s video series on empathy. The videos are emotional and powerful, reaching beyond our minds and into our hearts.

The videos beautifully show the very human side to our healthcare experiences. After watching the video, despite the complexity, technology, and process focus of healthcare,  you can’t help but walk away reminded of the humanness of it all.

It’s the humanness that patients understand best. It’s the small things we do to show them compassion, even if we don’t know the full onslaught of details of what is going on in their lives. We are sensitive that every patient is a human with a story: a life of  worries and stresses that they are doing their best to handle, with the added anxiety of their health situation to boot.

What many people don’t know is that the Cleveland Clinic empathy videos were inspired by a  video put out by a quick service chicken restaurant,  Chick- Fil-A .

You heard me right. Chick-Fil-A.

I found Chick-Fil-A’s video just as moving if not more so than the Cleveland Clinic videos in the way it evokes the truth of our human condition no matter where we are.

Chick-Fil-A does more than dish out food. They want to make a valuable connection with other human beings in their community. Food is the means by which they have opportunities to “create a remarkable experience.”

Healthcare is a means by which we also have ample opportunities to create memorable experiences for others. To give back. To make our communities stronger. To change people’s lives for the better. To fulfill our own individual missions as well as be a part of something bigger and have way more of an impact than anything we could ever do on our own.

In a hospital or picking up a sandwich at Chick-Fil-A, it’s the raw experiences of being human that connect us all.