Patient Experience

HealthLeaders Media Council members discuss how they enhance patient experience in their organizations.

This article first appeared in the March 2017 issue of HealthLeaders magazine.

Rachel Provau
CNO
Bayfront Health Spring Hill
Spring Hill, Florida

We subscribe to Studer Principles at Bayfront Health Spring Hill, and we follow them very closely. They focus on patient experience, with the pillars of quality, people, growth, finance, and community service. We call our program Community Cares. I think adhering to these principles has helped us to be successful and to better engage with patients.

I think it's important to remember that we see patients who are at their worst, and are not in their own environment. Going out of your way to make the environment comfortable, ensuring that you're not walking into a room with a clipboard and looking down at patients in the bed instead of meeting them at eye level, and always applying the practice of reminding yourself that it could be your family member in the bed will lead to effective communication with patients.

We also teach all of our staff an acronym, SAFE, which stands for "support the team; ask a question; focus on the task; and effective communication." If you take those components, you have the key to being successful in 99% of patient encounters.

We have utilized nurse leader rounding and nonclinical directors to visit patients' rooms, introduce themselves, and ask how it's going. We have made a significant improvement in patient engagement and communication over the last 12 months.

Deborah Visconi
Director of Operations
Morristown Medical Center
Morristown, New Jersey

We've implemented electronic rounding tools through mobile technology using tablets. That allows anyone, from nurse managers to care coordinators to hospital leadership to round on a patient and get that patient's immediate feedback on anything.

These are new tools we recently rolled out. We're learning how powerful they are. We are able to address patients' concerns and needs while they're still in the bed, which gives us more accountability and a more transparent culture.

Other new methods we've implemented to enhance the patient experience include utilizing patient TVs. It allows patients to communicate their needs, including environmental issues such as temperature control or if they need another blanket and other comforts. They make a request using their television controller, and that request goes to the appropriate department or to a nurse to follow up on it.

The patients are very pleased; the feedback that we're getting is that they like that we can act on their concerns right in the moment.

A more old-school strategy we're using on our outpatient side is a simple comment card system that allows patients to give us feedback. It allows us to address any needs the patients might have before they leave, and to recognize staff members who stood out.

Patricia Boeckmann
Vice President, Hospital and Specialty Services
Titus Regional Medical Center
Mount Pleasant, Texas

Titus is using tablets and in-house-developed survey tools to ask patients about their experience. We gather that input before the patient leaves. We can use the real-time information to make changes quickly, do immediate service recovery if necessary, or redirect patients as needed—for example, if the patient needs additional treatment sooner than originally anticipated, we can use these tools to set that up. It allows for real-time direction and validation.

Work has been done by our chief nursing officer to pay attention to our outgoing patients and any needs they might have prior to discharge. We are able to take that information right from the bedside to leadership, which helps support the staff and make changes more quickly. We also depend heavily on our case management department and our hospitalists to communicate with patients, and then provide us with that feedback.

We also use Press Ganey surveys to get feedback and identify missed opportunities. We're going to be rolling out leader rounding as well. This is important for many reasons, but I like to point out that there's ample evidence that engaged patients will better follow through on postdischarge recommendations for care, are more compliant with medication, and are more dutiful about seeing their physician after the discharge. I also believe through data we can show a direct correlation between patient engagement and staff engagement, as well as readmission and almost every other quality metric.

We have just extended an offer to bring on a patient experience coordinator. This professional will be working with the staff, including physicians, to really improve our culture and our awareness of patient experience.

Marilyn Daniels
Director, Case Management
Methodist Stone Oak Hospital
San Antonio, Texas

On effective rounding: We do leader rounding every morning at 10 a.m., Monday through Friday. If you're a director or above, no matter which area you work in, you go to roll call every morning and are then assigned a group of patients to round on.

At that time, every patient in our facility is visited, touched, and talked to by one of our leaders. This interaction includes senior leaders—everybody who is director level and above is required to come to roll call unless they are on vacation or have a major off-site obligation that day.

If a patient has a complaint or concern that relates to another department, we contact the director of that department and do service recovery at that time. This has been beneficial; we've been doing this for about a year now. Our satisfaction scores are now in the 81st percentile for HCAHPS—previously, we were in the 68th-70th percentile.

On engaging patients: We always make sure to ask patients open-ended questions, and to talk to them about their plan of care as it appears on their whiteboard. We'll say things like, "It looks like you're getting pain medication every four hours. How is that going for you?" and ask if we're responding to their needs, ensure they know how to use their call light, and inquire about how long it takes for the nurse to arrive when called. They open up once you start asking questions.