Consumer Engagement

HealthLeaders Media Council members discuss how their organizations engage the patient/consumer.

This article first appeared in the July/August 2016 issue of HealthLeaders magazine.

Richard Polheber
CEO
Benson Hospital
Benson, Arizona

On the link between outreach and consumerism: When we started to focus on outreach, we realized that despite Benson Hospital having been around for 50 years, there were people in our community who didn't even know we existed.

To raise awareness of the hospital, we've tried to pursue various wellness initiatives that aren't necessarily paid practices that generate revenue, but that get our name out and make consumers and community members aware of our organization. We have support programs for patients with diabetes and respiratory problems, and we invite guest speakers for them to learn about how to manage their conditions. Our nutritionist visits senior living complexes and offers nutrition counseling. Recently, we did some outreach with fifth graders about what it means to eat healthfully.

We have an annual health fair. Last year, we had about 55 vendors offering educational material and information on anything from simple things like diet and exercise to buying special insurance for helicopter transportation in a medical emergency.

We have become very much involved in our community. At every parade, at every event in the community, we maintain an educational booth. We get involved with schools, make an effort to donate school supplies, and organize toy drives around the holidays for local kids.

The goal, I believe, is to be viewed as a value-added business leader in the community, and to make life better for everyone who lives in the region.

Leonard Grossman, MD
President and CEO
Princeton Medical Group
Princeton, New Jersey

I do agree to some extent that focusing on patients as consumers can be useful to our organization. We're looking to improve access, both in ease of making appointments and also in expanding our appointment times. We have three offices, and offering those three locations improves access. Two of our locations have infusion capabilities.

Our organizational philosophy values patient outreach. We now have a portal that sends out appointment reminders. We are encouraging patients to come in for routine visits, including physicals, pap smears, colonoscopies, and mammograms. We participate in a patient-centered medical home, and we employ a care coordinator. With the help of one of our payers, we're able to detect what we call "gaps in care," when patients have been diagnosed with a condition but have not been following up at regular intervals. We've started reaching out to them to follow up and make sure they're getting routine care and follow-up visits for conditions like hypertension and diabetes.

To ensure that our staff is getting the message right, patients take a survey immediately after each visit using an iPad. We tally the feedback from patients and give feedback to our staff. I think that we could be a lot stronger in emphasizing better patient experience—it's an area we can work harder on.

Eric Franz
Vice President of Finance and CFO
Graham Hospital
Canton, Illinois

In looking at how to engage our patients, I believe we need to define what they want. We need to ensure that we're able to focus on their expectations and outcomes.

I'm not a clinical person, but I can tell when good customer service is provided, and I think most patients are in the same boat. The patient-consumer and his or herfamily can tell when we do a good job from a customer service perspective.

It's not only the clinical side of care that is important. From the moment the patient starts the process of his or her encounter, from the moment he or she is greeted by a volunteer or receptionist at the front door, that's what kicks off the whole engagement process—a process that doesn't end until the patient is completely free and clear of anything that encumbers him or her, such as a bill that we may have sent, or another responsibility that he or she may have from a financial perspective. Throughout that encounter, we need to make sure that the patient has an experience that reaches his or her expectations or better.

However, we have not created a formal program to do patient engagement training. We do have regular discussions internally about the importance of that kind of activity.

Kathy Landreth
President and CEO
Bath Community Hospital
Hot Springs, Virginia

We are a small, rural critical access hospital located in a part of the country where the population is somewhat dwindling, although to either side of us are larger hospital systems. So for the small hospitals like us, it gives us an opportunity because consumers are able to shop around.

Being small—we have about 160 employees, both full- and part-time—I think it's easier for us to make changes, such as deciding that we're going to focus on patient engagement scores, than for a larger organization where it has layers of employees and management to go through.

I think that in the age of consumerism, patients choose a facility because of the service that is delivered and the experience they have there. So the opportunity lies in improved patient experience, improved quality of service, and then the overall health of the population that we serve.

On providing convenient care: We really put a lot of focus on our rural health clinic. The focus of being able to fit patients in and see them when they call is really not an easy task, but we were able to get our providers on board. We saw 1,200 more patients in our rural health clinic in 2015 than we did in 2014. In a community that only houses about 4,500 people, that is huge. And I believe this success goes back to our focus on patient experience