Dr. Duffy is an acclaimed patient experience leader and the Chief Executive Officer at ExperiaHealth
Years ago, one of my mentors said to me 20% of healing is linked to our technology and tools, the other 80% is something else—it’s the human to human connections, the physical environment, and spirituality. Two decades into my medical career and the technological leaps have been startling. But the other 80% of healing hasn’t fared nearly as well. Regulatory requirements have doctors and nurses asking questions and taking steps purely for the purposes of checking a box. The business environment has pushed clinicians to constantly work faster and smarter and more profitably. Caught in the middle, the once-sacred physician-patient and nurse-patient relationships have suffered.
Finally, after two decades of leading the work to humanize the delivery of medical technology, there is now a focus on patient experience- largely due to the government mandating that hospitals measure patient satisfaction (HCAHPS), publically report the results, and link reimbursement to the scores. Healthcare organizations must improve the patient experience.
But how?
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.
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.
But for these programs to be successful, you must have buy–in and leadership from physicians. They must be engaged in the effort. If they don’t buy-in—if they just view the patient and family experience as the softer and less important side of medicine—the effort will fail. If influential clinicians view patient experience efforts as just another mandate- if the view is simply ‘deliver great results at a low cost and also be nice,’ then these efforts will fail.
Improving the patient experience is about more than being nice and the value extends well beyond mandates, publicly-reported scores, and reimbursement. Organizational and clinical research is beginning to show the connection between patient experience and clinical outcomes, safety, and financial performance.
But more than that, patients should not have to be a “VIP” or know “someone” to have a great experience or get access to care. Being treated with competence and compassion should be the standard of care for all who enter our doors.
HCAHPS has given healthcare a call-to-action. Now we can set about restoring healing to our health care settings.
About Bridget Duffy, MD
M. Bridget Duffy, M.D., is the Chief Executive Officer at ExperiaHealth, where her mission is to assist organizations in rapidly transforming the patient experience.
Prior to founding ExperiaHealth, Dr. Duffy served as Chief Experience Officer of the Cleveland Clinic—the first senior position of its kind in the nation—leading the institution in establishing patient experience as its top strategic priority. She is a frequent speaker on the subject of why patient experience matters and how it impacts clinical outcomes. Her work has earned her the Quantum Leap Award for taking the risk to spur internal change in her field and has led her to be featured in HealthLeaders magazine as one of “20 People Who Make Healthcare Better.”
