Achieving Patient (aka Customer) Experience Excellence: Lessons From a Successful Cultural Transformation in a Hospital PDF

Preface

Patient Experience management has always been a part of healthcare work since interacting with patients has always underlined giving consideration and care to their experience to varying degrees. However, until now, Patient Experience has been left to what we can call an intuitive style of management. This means that the nature of the experience delivered has been heavily determined by a mix of circumstantial factors mainly related to the individuals behind the experience management's personal interpretations, the employees' moral compass, and current resource restrictions that affect ad hoc decisions. As a result, two basic problems arise:

• The Patient Experience effectively becomes a series of individual transactions even though the patient perceives the experience as a whole. The end result is that the patient is often confused, frustrated, and alienated by the inconsistent experience.

• Well-meaning healthcare professionals can all be fully intent on delivering the best possible Patient Experience, but they do not really appreciate how to calibrate the experience they deliver with that of others or even know what a great Patient Experience is beyond a good clinical outcome.

With the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) firmly in place in the United States, efforts to manage the Patient Experience became mandatory and business justified. Reimbursement to hospitals is now partially dependent on how well patients feel they have been treated. Naturally, that puts Patient Experience management at or near the top of the prioritylist for hospitals.

In the United Kingdom and Europe, patient satisfaction has been a matter of attention since the 1990s, being widely accepted as an outcome measure in trials testing new drugs or interventions as well as a measure of quality of care.^* In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service (NHS) 2010–2015 plan highlights the need to significantly expand the measurement of patient satisfaction and links significant portions of provider income to Patient Experience. This means, for the first time, connecting the level of patient satisfaction with hospital income. Over time, up to 10% of hospital income could be dependent on patient satisfaction.^*

Unfortunately, this new high priority does not readily translate into guaranteed collaboration, understanding, or clarity of action for executives, managers, or other employees within hospitals. In fact, for many it became a difficult task of balancing lofty goals with budget, time, and resource capacity restraints. It would be no issue to achieve the highest marks if the organization could freely invest time and resources to focus on getting those goals achieved. However, reality requires a more skilled juggling effort among the clinical, business, and experience aspects of hospital work. Moreover, it requires a different kind of mindset, decision-making model, and overall approach to how employees behave within the organization. This different approach should naturally and intuitively lead to an optimum balance between patient satisfaction and business benefit when put into practice on a daily basis. In addition, this will allow, enhance even, the best clinical outcomes.

Putting both business and Patient Experience knowledge into action is the challenging part. Furthermore, that difficulty is compounded by the need to embed that culture across the organization such that it becomes "a way of being" rather than just another set of additional tasks to pile on the heap of existing programs and initiatives. Task orientation leading to ineffectual ongoing training, consultants, and projects that absorb money and effort is harmful, although it can appear to be forward moving simply because the language sounds good and the activity looks busy.

The original idea of this book was to help healthcare professionals understand the components required to build a customer-centric (i.e., patient-centric) culture and inspire action. It quickly became clear that the lessons that would make a patient-centric cultural transformation successful are similar to those that would make any customer-centric transformation successful.

In this book, we uncover how one such cultural transformation was successfully achieved in a hospital setting. As stated previously, the lessons learned can be applied anywhere (hospital, retail services, contact center, etc.) and in any industry (healthcare, telecommunications, financial services, etc.).

Rhonda and Qaalfa first worked together in 2005. Qaalfa was a consultant hired to help the hospital system improve its customer experience. That work was very successful. Since that time, Rhonda has applied the learning to a variety of hospitals within the system. Specifically, the system took over management of a community hospital (which we henceforth refer to as "Community General"), which had twenty years of inconsistent financial and patient satisfaction performance.

Rhonda was brought onboard at Community General to bring the magic that had helped improve other hospitals in the system.

This is the story of how Rhonda first and Greg as an ally worked with and led a team to create a culture in which things are not allowed to just happen but an experience is deliberately created. The story is told from the point of view of two people. However, the story was not created by those two alone. It took the efforts and knowledge of many leaders, support people, and frontline team members.

Rhonda Dishongh and Greg Erickson's story is a rich source of instructive lessons. Qaalfa and Kalina summarize the learning into several key points each healthcare manager should know and act on when creating a culture of service excellence.

For the remainder of the book, we use avatars to make it easy to identify whose point of view is being told:

In each chapter, we start with the story of what happened in the words of the Patient Experience practitioners, Rhonda and Greg, who lived it day in and day out. They uncover the situation as it unfolds, showing not only what they did but also why they did it and, importantly, what it felt like. Achieving a cultural transformation is hard work. It is not rocket science, but it is really easy to miss the key lessons because most people are so focused on the tactics to implement that they forget the intent of the tactics. Thus, Customer Experience experts Qaalfa and Kalina follow up each chapter's story with the key lessons.

We hope this book will help you start a change toward achieving Patient Experience excellence.

Let's begin ... .

^* Delnoij, Diana M., Measuring patient experiences in Europe: What can we learn from the experiences in the USA and England? European Journal of Public Health, Vol. 19, No. 4, 354–356, 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Public Health Association.

^* The NHS 5 Year Plan. http://patientexperiencefeedback.com/measuring_patient_satisfaction/ the_nhs_5_year_strategic_plan.html (accessed November 2012).