Four Steps to Improve Patient Experience (by M. Bridget Duffy, M.D., Chief Executive Officer at ExperiaHealth)
Brigit Duffy shares some simple, but powerful, steps for sustainably changing the patient experience.
(Full post: http://engagingthepatient.com/2010/12/15/four-steps-to-improve-the-patient-ex... )
How do we build health systems that deliver an excellent patient experience and also deliver excellent clinical and financial outcomes?
The answer is four straight-forward, yet often difficult steps.
1. Patient experience must be the top strategic priority
Executive leadership must understand that the only way to differentiate their organizations in today’s healthcare market is by delivering an extraordinary patient experience. Successful leaders will not just focus on meeting a pay-for-performance goal, they will focus on creating a culture that that values the patient experience as a way to improve care and to improve outcomes. Mostly importantly, executives will engage physicians to lead this strategy in partnership with nursing leadership.
2. Focus on optimizing the employee experience
Engaged and satisfied employees create engaged and satisfied patients. Likewise, disengaged and unhappy employees create patients with similar qualities. In addition, when you have disengaged employees, it also impacts quality, safety, and financial performance. Is your facility an environment at which doctors and nurses plan to spend the rest of their careers? Are your leaders focused on defining the components of an optimal employee experience?
3. Map the gaps in the human experience
Many organizations have created patient and family councils to inform their improvement efforts, but most organizations do not effectively use this information. Organizations need to integrate the voice of patients and families into process improvement efforts, thereby creating new standards of care or “Always Events” for patient experience. Most process improvement efforts strip out waste, and do very little to restore what matters most to patients and families.
4. Link your patient experience strategy with your quality and safety efforts
The fatigue in healthcare organizations today often comes from multiple teams addressing quality, safety, and patient experience in silos. Integrating these strategies with the voice of patients and families at the center will more rapidly deliver improved results.
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She continues with an example:
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So how would this work in an actual setting?
Here is an example of the type of “Always Event” or standards of care that you can rapidly adopt and that will differentiate your organization:
While working with a surgical team who wanted to make improvements in their same day surgery unit, they involved patients and families in this effort. Not only did they map the gaps in inefficiency and redundancy from the employee and patient perspective, but they also found what was missing from the patient perspective – addressing their emotional and physical needs.
One patient in the focus group asked, “why right before you put me to sleep, do you tell me everything that can go wrong with the procedure from infection, bleeding and even the possibility of death (Informed Consent) and then make me sign the form? After you do that, why don’t you have a form that tells me everything that could go right?”
Overnight, this organization created a new form (Informed “Hope”) that described the desired outcomes from the procedure and provided piece of mind to the patient and their family prior to the procedure.
Integrating the voice of the patient and family into your process improvement efforts can rapidly catalyze your efforts to improve patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes.
