Enhancing Patient Experience Through Process Improvement Methodologies

Building a culture of patient experience excellence can be especially challenging in healthcare. Part of the reason that transforming organizational culture is so difficult is their size and complexity: providers are typically large institutions with a diverse range of professional and nonprofessional staff, representing a long list of departments and functions. Further, patient care is increasingly taking place outside the four walls of hospitals and includes the full range of the continuum—primary care offices, ambulatory and outpatient locations, convenient care clinics, skilled nursing facilities, and home health providers—often placing it outside of direct management control.

Healthcare providers use a variety of strategies to meet this challenge, including the use of a chief experience officer and implementing process improvement methodologies.