Patient care is always top of mind for healthcare workers, but National Patient Recognition Week is the perfect time to pause and reflect on the patient experience you’re creating.
The COVID pandemic has heightened patient sensitivity and uncertainty, shifting how organizations provide care and engage with patients. In 2020 we saw the rise of telehealth, increased consumerization of healthcare, and a reliance on digital engagement. As 2021 progresses we’re seeing these trends here to stay, intensifying the importance of experience management. Organizations must ensure they’re connecting with patients, building loyalty, and delivering exceptional experiences.
Our CEO, Paul Jaglowski, connected with leaders across a variety of healthcare settings to discuss the state of patient experience. In our conversations, we noticed five central themes repeatedly stood out, regardless of care setting. As you reflect on your patient experience goals and plan for 2021, we hope these 5 key findings will help inform your organization’s efforts to improve the patient experience.
1. Invest in deeper understanding
Healthcare leadership continues to acknowledge the importance of having adequate information management systems in place to monitor key quality, experience, and safety metrics within their organizations.
“By investing a deeper understanding of the metrics, both for outcome and process tracking, healthcare teams can be far more equipped to evaluate and impact the patient’s experience in real time. Without a tool in place to measure these metrics in real time, any healthcare organization will be at a noticeable disadvantage.” – Knox Singleton, former CEO, Inova Health System
2. Establish real-time transparency
It’s paramount that healthcare teams prioritize both uncovering and understanding the process pitfalls that produce gaps in their team’s ability to deliver quality care. Having real-time transparency into how patients perceive the care they receive is critical. If organizations continuously commit to providing real-time visibility into patient satisfaction, care teams will be more effective at meeting their patient needs.
“Our real-time patient feedback platform allows my team to collect raw patient feedback and distill the most crucial insights in a matter of seconds. It gives my team and me complete transparency over what is going on in the hospital so that I can make sure our team is recovering any service issues that patients might have prior to discharge.” – Kathy Ritch, Director of Service Excellence, High Point Regional Hospital
3. Connect prior to discharge
The majority of the individuals we spoke with expressed frustration that they had no way to learn about a patient’s concerns until after the patient had been discharged. This unfortunate status quo is no longer a limitation. By investing in a real-time patient feedback and information management platform that automatically communicates with on-duty teams about patient concerns, teams can perform service recovery before patients even leave the hospital.
“With our real-time patient feedback system, the site administrator knows in real time whether a patient had a good or bad experience and can contact that patient directly if he or she left a response that warrants service recovery. And all data is in personalized dashboards, so you can quickly identify trends and create better best practices for the overall footprint.” – Chaneka Pigatt, COO, CareSouth Carolina
4. Develop a learning culture
Learning from patients on a quarterly basis is not enough. Teams need to learn in real-time from every patient experience in an unbiased way, so they can consistently uncover how to deliver the best care possible.
“Before implementing a real-time patient feedback platform we were collecting lengthy, annual surveys that received very low response rates. Receiving this survey data several months after patients’ most recent experiences with us resulted in our team struggling to find value from the limited volume of insights.” – Jack Bretcher, COO, PartnerMD
5. Hear from patients in their own words
Many of the current surveys being used in healthcare limit patients to providing feedback on a numerical or multiple-choice scale, with no option to provide additional insight. While this may allow for easier benchmarking, it deters patients from providing key details about why they provided a specific score or felt a certain way. If you want to truly learn what moves your patients, it is essential that you give them a way to provide open text feedback.
“It has been great to hear from patients in their own words about the care that we provided. We have been able to diagnose issues with the patient’s experience as soon as they arise and make adjustments to the patient’s journey. Feedtrail makes it easier than ever to monitor these individual patient experiences across our footprint.” – Jennifer Allison, Manager, Inova VIP 360
Feedtrail’s experience management platform can help you implement these best practices at your organization. Engage at key moments of each patient’s unique journey, before, during, and after their visit, and gain powerful insights that can change your organization’s trajectory for the better. With the right tools in place, when National Patient Recognition Week 2022 arrives you can feel assured that your patients consistently feel recognized and heard.
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