This is a conversation about patient experience in the bottom line programs and strategies that add value. The panelists are Dr. RCI Gar, Dr. Jim Krak, Brian Carlson, and Carrie Officer. They each provide brief introductions of themselves and their organizations.
Programs and Strategies
We recently implemented two programs to improve patient experience and increase the bottom line. The first program is an app that combines telehealth, patient portal and design thinking concepts to create a simpler way for patients and families to obtain care. This resulted in increased utilization of the patient portal and high satisfaction ratings from users. The second program is a chatbot that provides post appendectomies care and has resulted in an 85% engagement rate, a 95% satisfaction rate, and a reduction in return to the ER. At Vanderbilt, they view patient experience as the sum of all interactions, so they started a campaign called “Defining Personalized Care” to teach their workforce about the culture of delivering care. They have since pivoted the message to the community and now focus on “Making Healthcare Personal” with modules such as service recovery.
Service recovery is a skill set that needs to be taught in healthcare. Vanderbilt has implemented an automated way of matching comments from patients with the team that accessed their records and sending those comments out. This has been very successful and has reminded staff why they do what they do. Additionally, many medical groups have centralized their call centers which can lead to negative patient interaction, so it's important to go back to how it used to be while also not overwhelming practices with too much work. Digital registration is a great way to help streamline processes and make it easier for patients.
City of Hope Atlanta has implemented a system to expedite care and reduce lag time between decision making and care implementation. They have also partnered with other institutions to allow for peer-to-peer consultations as well as access to the latest treatments. Dr. Mohan removed the call center to allow patients to connect directly with him, trained front desk staff to handle questions, and made sure to be accessible across all platforms. His organization measures patient experience through net promoter score and surveys, and they share this data with everyone in the organization to ensure they are all on the same page.
Improving Patient Experience
In order to improve patient experience, we need to focus on goal alignment and creating a tactical plan for frontline staff. We also need to use a composite score of all questions from our survey vendors and leverage existing one-point solutions instead of reinventing the wheel. Our guiding principles should be focused on giving patients control and autonomy, simplicity, continuity, cancer prevention and chronic management of disease.
We need to focus on where the patient wants things to be and give them the ability to make decisions independently. We also need to respect patients and make them feel heard, respected and given choices. Amazon's purchase of One Medical has caused an existential crisis in the healthcare world and has highlighted the need for more people-centric healthcare. We need to think of new metrics and ways of getting reimbursed in order to provide better care to our patients. It is important to keep a balance between convenience and high quality care. Lastly, now is the time to lean into patient experience and not get rid of it.
Note: This is an AI generated transcript, not edited by a staff writer and is solely intended for educational purposes. If you have any questions/concerns, reach out to events@beckershealthcare.com
This panel was live on 04/04/2023 at the event listed here.
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