RN Named Chief Patient Experience Officer

Hospitals are increasingly adding patient experience positions. Elevating the job to the senior executive level speaks to the growing importance of patient experience in healthcare.

The Mount Sinai Health System in New York has added a senior executive to its C-suite, and it's a nurse: Sandra Myerson, MBA, MS, BSN, RN, who's taken on the newly-created position of Senior Vice President and Chief Patient Experience Officer.

Serving the Mount Sinai Health System and the Joseph F. Cullman Jr. Institute for Patient Care, Myerson had been on the job "all of nine days," when we talked on the phone last week about her short- and long-term goals, as well as the scope of the brand new role.

Although hospitals have increasingly been employing directors of patient experience, elevating the job to the senior executive level speaks to the growing importance of patient experience in healthcare.

"It's not just about how we're communicating with patients, but how they're moving through their hospitalizations," Myerson says.

Consistency
Whether patients are visiting one of Mount Sinai's seven hospital campuses, its 12 minority-owned ambulatory surgical centers, or its 45 ambulatory care practices, Myerson says the patient experience should consistently be of the same high quality.

She plans to "work with the executive leadership and the president and CEOs of the hospitals to really define the patient experience across the system, and integrate all of the programs and initiatives so there's consistency."

At the top of her to-do list as she settles into the brand-new job? First is assessing where each facility is in terms of patient experience and their understanding of opportunities to improve it. She'll also work to identify where faculties might be struggling and what they're doing to address those shortcomings.

"I can't be everywhere," Myerson says, calling the job "an elephant" that requires tackling "reasonable pieces," rather everything all at once. The big, system-wide scale of the job means that Myerson can't do it alone, so a big part of her work will be about maximizing employee engagement, providing support to hospitals and their leadership, and making sure employees feel valued.

Room for Improvement
"A lot of work is being done," she says. "I'm not creating anything new. I'm trying to foster what's already here."

That's not to say there's no room for improvement. For instance, she says surveys indicate that patients think the clinical care is good, but they want "consistent compassion."

"Patients want to be heard, they want to be showed that someone is listening to them," Myerson says. "I think we need to get to the basics around reducing patient anxiety."

One way to achieve that is by implementing purposeful hourly rounding by nursing staff, a process that is in various stages of implementation throughout system, with various degrees of success, Myerson says.

Also on the agenda is improving processes to enable patients to move through their visits more seamlessly, reduce wait times, and eliminate redundancy. "That really is a foundational process that helps patients feel safe," she says. "It's touching everything that the patient comes in contact with."

Making patients feel safe will also come with training about how to communicate with compassion and empathy.

"No one really taught us how to do that," she says. "We trust people who are listening to us and are taking care of us."

I mentioned to Myerson that focusing on "soft" nursing skills like these—rather their clinical expertise—makes some nurses bristle. But clinical expertise and great bedside manner aren't mutually exclusive; they're both necessary for excellent patient care.

Myerson says that for patients, clinical expertise is an expectation; patients don't ask nurses about their certifications, and they take it as a given that their nurses are experts.

An Emphasis on Communication
"Patients can't judge our clinical expertise," she says. "The only way they can judge us is how we interact with them. Yes, you have to have great clinical skills," but "the only thing that can differentiate with us is how we communicate with the patient. That's what patients are looking for."

Because of her background with patient care as a nurse, Myerson feels uniquely positioned to take on the patient experience role at Mount Sinai.

"I think that a nurse has the clinical background to be able to relate to the nursing staff, who are the ones who are primarily interfacing with patients," she says. And the fact that her position is an executive leadership one "gives me some credibility and clout."

A year from now, Myerson says, she hopes the health system will gain some traction in patient experience scores in hospitals where they're lagging. She also wants to help hospital leaders implement foundational programs around employee engagement, as well as empower employees to feel positive about their work and feel like they're making a difference. Her success will depend on the relationships she builds, something that Myerson says is already looking good.

"People are so excited to meet me," she says. "So excited, delighted that someone will be there to organize and orchestrate this work."