If your healthcare organization is like most, you have plans to generate the Triple Aim focus on improvements to create more revenue, better outcomes and higher patient satisfaction.

While process enhancement worked in the fee-for-service era, it is a tail-wagging-the-dog approach in today’s value-based care environment. What I mean is that formerly, hospitals conceived the processes that our patients experienced. But in the new world of value-based care, it is the patient that designs the process – not the hospital. Look at successful companies in other industries, such as Apple and Starbucks, and consider what they have in common: they rely on customer experience to drive process design. In fact, according to a CEI Survey, 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience. As the saying goes in retail, customers vote with their feet.

Here are three good reasons to join them in customer-driven process design:

First, the customer in healthcare is changing. In the fee-for-service era, hospitals often catered to doctors as their primary customers. The hospital’s task was to obtain and hold onto physician loyalty. However, in today’s era of value-based care, patients have emerged as the new customer—the one that defines value. Their opinions, their wants, their needs and their desires ultimately play a greater role in who and how healthcare gets delivered and consumed.

Second, patients are finally gaining the information to demand it. Surveys increasingly show that patients, like customers in other arenas – such as retail and banking – are gravitating toward providers who deliver a better overall experience. More than ever before, patients are choosing where they receive care, as opposed to just going where their provider tells them to go.

Third, care no longer just takes place within the hospital or clinic walls. A patient’s journey doesn’t end when they are discharged from the hospital or leave a clinic. In reality, the transition out of the hospital is often just beginning. Today’s patients – healthcare’s new customer – want hospitals and caregivers to help them as they overcome barriers to regain their health. In value-based environments, patients expect providers to help create an entire roadmap back to health, and connect them to the local community resources they’ll need along the way.

A successful journey creates winners all the way around: happier, healthier and more satisfied patients, providers and hospitals. And that, after all, is the ultimate goal of the Triple Aim.