Press Ganey: Safety, quality, experience and engagement are all interconnected — So why are improvement efforts siloed?

Mackenzie Bean (Twitter) -

Healthcare organizations must take an integrated approach to improving safety, quality, experience and engagement, as these attributes function interdependently to influence performance, according to Press Ganey's 2018 Strategic Insights report, titled "A Strategic Blueprint for Transformational Change."

Press Ganey researchers conducted a series of cross-domain analyses to assess the influence of safety, quality, experience and engagement on health systems' overall care ratings. They discovered a "dose-response" effect between domains, suggesting performance in one both drives and is driven by the performance of other domains.

The report offers an in-depth framework on how healthcare organizations can remove the silos surrounding improvement efforts for each domain to better align performance goals and meet patients' healthcare expectations. 

"When you execute on these things together, leveraging a culture of engaged and well-developed healthcare leaders and managers, you can deliver higher performance on safety, quality and experience," Jim Merlino, MD, president and CMO of Press Ganey's strategic consulting division, said during an interview with Becker's Hospital Review. "So the focus of this report is how to do that — how to leverage what we know the data tell us, and how to begin to organize and execute around meeting patients' needs to help achieve better performance."

The report centers on six core principles to help leaders achieve performance goals.

Strategic Principles

  1. Commit to a goal of Zero Harm
  2. Put patients at the center of the planning, delivery and assessment of care
  3. Recognize safety, quality and patient centricity as primary elements of the patient experience and understand their interdependencies

Operational Principles

  1. Drive change using data and transparency
  2. Transform culture and leadership
  3. Focus on accountability and execution

To download the full report, click here.

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