When Eddie Borrego took on the chief experience officer role at Miami-based Jackson Health System about five years ago, the organization held a one-star CMS rating for patient experience. Four years later, it had reached three stars.
Mr. Borrego, who also serves as senior vice president and chief executive of Jackson Health’s regional hospital network and physician services, credits much of that improvement to a playbook of what the system calls “care action tactics.” Jackson already had a strong patient experience data program, he said in an upcoming episode of the Becker’s Healthcare Podcast. What it lacked was a shared definition of what good care looks like from the patient’s side of the bed.
“We had done a lot of work in the past around data and making sure that we understood what the patients were saying and needed,” he said. “Where we were lacking was really assuming that our caregivers wanted to do the best, but maybe they didn’t have a playbook on what the best looked like.”
To build one, Jackson Health’s three-person patient experience team brought front-line nurses, physicians and ancillary staff together with patients who had both good and poor experiences. The result was a set of research-backed actions to implement across the system’s more than 2,000 beds.
Some tactics carry catchy names meant to stick with staff members. In a “warm welcome,” nurses greet patients and families as soon as they arrive on the unit from the emergency department. “Commit to sit” asks physicians to sit down when explaining care to patients and families. For post-discharge phone calls, every patient receives a call within 24 hours from the caregivers who treated them, confirming they have their medications and understand their plan of care.
Because the behaviors are visible, managers can easily audit them.
“All of these are visual cues that represent to the patient that there is care happening that is patient-forward and -centric, but also it allows our leaders, our nurse managers, our physician leaders, to really be able to survey our units and see that these visual cues are happening,” Mr. Borrego said.
Leaders compare the care action tactic compliance with HCAHPS survey results to see whether units that have consistent performance have better HCAHPS top box rates. Jackson Health spent close to a year on training, with separate but aligned playbooks for caregivers, front-line leaders and senior leaders, so each tactic had a defined role at every level.
As CMS now allows family members to complete patient experience surveys on behalf of patients and asks about care team coordination, Mr. Borrego said the system may add a new care tactic that brings family members, with the patient’s consent, into care conversations as Jackson Health works toward four stars.
“That is due in large part to the work that’s being done at the bedside,” he said of the system’s progress so far.
