COVER STORY · POPULATION HEALTH MANAGEMENT
review communications and materials that are going to be sent out to patients. Almost always, the council had great suggestions for rewriting the language in a way that seemed less stuffy and academic because it was written by a bunch of doctors and rewriting it in a way that really resonated with patients and would be clearer and feel more acces- sible to patients. The PAC even rewrote the recruitment materials used to recruit patients into the PAC, and we saw an improvement in recruitment after they did that.” Building trust with the PAC is the key,
Clear says. Half or more of these patients used prescribed pharmaceutical opioids as part of their pathway to addiction to opioids, so there is an almost universal experience of having negative healthcare- related experiences in the past and feel- ing wronged by the healthcare system, he adds. “We have to explain that we do care about this condition. We see these negative experiences that you've had in the past and we're doing something with your help to try and make things better for you and for patients who are in the same boat. It takes time to get that message across and really develop trust. I think the first six months of PAC sessions were mostly devoted to trust-building before we really got into quality improvement work.”
Rebuilding the house In describing what NewYork-Presbyterian did to address the decline in patient expe- rience scores, Evans uses a construction analogy. “It is like we built a beach house by the ocean, and we spent years building it and then a hurricane came and wiped it down to its foundation, so we've had to rebuild the house,” he says. That involves getting citizenship
behaviors back in place where employ- ees are aware of who's around them and are thinking about how they can help people — taking their earbuds out when they walk into work because they are now in the presence of patients and families. “These are basics that all of us should be doing to make sure that our environ- ment is welcoming,” Evans says. “We had to put those back in place. It is like the equivalent of a COVID booster shot; we needed a citizenship booster shot. We needed to train all of our new employees, some of who were new to NYP and some of whom were new to healthcare. Some of our new employees didn't know the NYP way of introducing yourself to a
Patient Experience Officer Role Still a Work in Progress
In trying to improve the patient experience, health systems grapple with defining and filling the relatively new position of chief patient experience officer. A senior partner in executive search firm WittKieffer’s Healthcare practice,
Michelle Johnson says she has seen people from diverse backgrounds hired as health system patient experience officers. That includes nurses and marketing people both from within and outside of healthcare. “I’ve seen people come at this from a hospitality background. I interviewed a gentleman who spent much of his career with Ritz-Carlton and it was fascinating to hear how he brought a customer-centric approach,” says Johnson, who also serves on the board of CentraCare, a $2 billion regional health system in Central and Southwestern Minnesota. She says the first step is to define the role. Is it working more in the C-suite or on the front lines? “Personally, I’ve seen most of these individuals at that mid-manager level, where I think a lot of good work can be done and initiatives advanced,” she says. Another important question is how you measure the impact of these positions and their projects. “We obviously have scores and surveys that look to measure this information,” Johnson says, “but is that really the whole picture? I tend to think big about what this individual is meant to accomplish.” In addition to increasing engagement and experience scores, health systems need to redesign the care delivery model to make life easier and happier for the patients who are receiving care. That’s more difficult to measure because it not clear what resources are necessary and how you organize those resources to affect change. “I think it has more to do with the type of person hired than it does the job description,” Johnson explains. “Not every organization has the size or scale to bring on a chief experience officer. I think only about 15 percent of health systems have an actual patient experience leader position, but the function should exist somewhere, and it usually is most effective if it sits with a leader who is particularly capable of leading change, because that’s what this is all about. And I like to see that person be more creative and have that patient-centered orientation because I think that’s where a lot of the solutions are going to lie.” Johnson says CentraCare is atypical in that its patient experience leader is also
its chief legal officer. “He is incredibly dynamic and very creative. He has been very good about energizing people and teams to think differently about how pa- tients come through every aspect of the organization,” she adds. “His observation is that there’s always room to improve on the inpatient side, but, in fact, the real opportunity lies in the outpatient space. If you think about the evolution of health- care and how we’re moving more and more into the outpatient space, I think that just underscores a need to really get our arms around that.”
patient. What's the NYP way of answer- ing a phone with someone who needs help? What's the NYP way of helping someone at a desk?” Other practices that had been dropped
during the pandemic emergency had to be reintroduced, such as a bedside shift report, where one nurse who is leaving work talks to the nurse starting their shift in the presence of the patient and introduces that nurse and explains what is going on with the patient. “All of those practices had gone by the wayside because people were rushed trying to get through their shift,” Evans says. “One by one, we have been bringing those best practices back.” One lesson learned, Evans adds, is that they can't throw all this at people all at
8
hcinnovationgroup.com | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2023
once. “Over the last 24 months, we put together a strategic plan and presented it to our board of trustees. It's a three-year plan, but it has been titrated. As staffing has recovered, as other things have got- ten easier, we're introducing layer upon layer back. We're trying to be very sensi- tive to our teams — to push ourselves to get better as best as we can, but to not overwhelm them.” Evans says this work is already show-
ing great progress in terms of patient experience scores. “Right now, we are having our best quarter ever, even before the pandemic. We began to recover in 2022, and now we're seeing accelerated improvement in 2023. We're hoping that reflects that we picked the right plan, and that it's working.” HI
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
