Healthcare organizations that have fully committed to improving patient experience share the common belief that developing a patient-centered culture is key to their success.
Hospitals and healthcare organizations are keeping their fingers crossed that the significant investments they've made in patient experience initiatives will have the trickle-down effect of improving market share, HCAHPS scores, and clinical outcomes.
The organizations that have fully committed to improving patient experience share the common belief that developing a patient-centered culture is key. They know cosmetic adjustments such as new paint and/or more smiles are not the answer, but those things can be the beginning of getting employees to "live the mission" of a hospital, believing that the patient is at the center of everything they do.
Increasingly, hospitals seem to be catching on to the need for a fully supportive culture. In the HealthLeaders Media Intelligence Report, Patient Experience Beyond HCAHPS: Care Coordination and Cultural Transformation Intelligence Report, nearly 40% of survey respondents said that their organizations planned to pursue a cultural transformation related to improving patient experience over the next three years.
If this describes your organization, buckle up, because it is not easy. Changing the culture of a hospital is very difficult; however, when it is done right, the results are rewarding.
Spotlight on a New Covenant
In the west Texas town of Lubbock, Covenant Health, a four-hospital system owned by Irvine, CA–based St. Joseph Health, took what some might call a touchy-feely approach to patient experience.
Called "Spotlighting," the program was developed in conjunction with design consultants at IDEO in 2010. The goal of spotlighting is to fulfill Covenant Health's objective of fostering sacred encounters with every patient.
"It's how we make people feel," says Cayce Kaufman, regional patient experience director for Covenant. "It's not just to increase our patient satisfaction. It's also to say that we believe that every encounter can be sacred, and [spotlighting] is how you help foster that."
The basis of spotlighting is finding opportunities that can become sacred encounters between a nurse and a caregiver, or doctor and a patient. The opportunities are called scenes, and they can take place anywhere, but IDEO found three main interactions that are a natural fit for fostering a sacred encounter: admitting, resting, and discharge. In spotlighting lingo, says Kaufman, it's 'warm welcome', 'sweet dreams', and 'thoughtful goodbye.'
Though the scenes sound standard, they aren't. Each department, or design team, creates its own scene during a brainstorming session that Kaufman leads. She first has the design team pick a moment that can be singled out as a potential sacred encounter, then she asks the team to pick a tone or a word that helps define how the staff want their patients to feel.
"Once you get the tone, you can decide, what does that look like? What are the gestures? It's not scripting. It's different than saying, 'You need to say this, and you need to do this.' We say, 'What types of things did your mom do?' "
To help the team define its tone, Kaufman has them go through magazines and cut out images that demonstrate the word the team picked. From there, the team develops a plan that consistently reinforces how the staff wants a patient to feel. This can be in the form of gestures, kind words, or "props," which Kaufman says are not far off from what doctors have been doing for years.
"It's a lot like a lollipop in a pediatrician's office. Was there value in that? Probably not, but how did it make the child feel?" she says.
What's important is that the communication, or encounter, be seamless and organic. Once the details have been worked out for a specific interaction, the team members try it out with a set of fresh eyes. It could be a patient, or it could be someone from a different unit. There is a lot of feedback and modifying the scene before it's rolled out to the entire department.
"It takes a long time to do this," says Kaufman, who estimates that start to finish, the process of spotlighting a single department can take as long as three months. A continuous feedback loop from patients to caregivers keeps the team informed, and is important to making sure their techniques are working.
Marketing's Role
The amount of time that Covenant spends on training its employees to accurately and compassionately communicate with patients puts it in front of other organizations that are just getting started.
Covenant's early entry into improving patient experience has paid off. The improvements that came after spotlighting began include improved employee morale, engagement from leadership, and HCAHPS scores, though tying those scores to patient experience is tricky, and not really an accurate reflection of one another.
Marketing's role in patient experience is important, says Lynne Cunningham, MPA, FACHE, Studer Group coach.
"Marketing can plan a key role in gathering data, interpreting data, and communicating data in a consistent manner," says Cunningham. "This applies to employee engagement, provider engagement, patient sat and clinical quality data."
Cunningham describes the pressure organizations are under to improve patient experience as "tremendous."
"If you're not getting better faster than the other guy, you're getting worse, and everyone is working on improving clinical and service metrics … no one is being left out of the equation."
Both Cunningham and Kaufman will speak about patient experience success keys in the HealthLeaders Media webcast, The New Patient Experience Model: Strategies to Leverage the Patient Perspective, on Tuesday, November 5 from 1PM – 2:30 PM ET.
Jacqueline Fellows is a contributing writer at HealthLeaders Media.