With tear-streaked cheeks, she reluctantly parted with her little girl. In a state of high anxiety she attempted to comprehend how exactly the mending and recovery process would take place.
And with patience and care, staff took the time to explain each step and, perhaps more importantly, make a real human connection.
Surely a positive outcome is what mattered most, but creating a memorable experience was the underlying goal of the employees at the American Girl Doll Hospital. And the little girl—a prized doll from the American Girl collection—turned out as good as new.
Gar Crispell, general manager for American Girl, shared this anecdote with us today on a panel of experts discussing the patient experience at HealthLeaders Media '09: The Hospital of the Future Now, a two-day leadership event in Chicago.
More than ever, healthcare organizations are trying to reinvent the patient experience—not just to see improvements to patient satisfaction scores, but also as a way of shifting the organizational culture to better meet quality and safety goals.
Although it's sometimes hard to do, it is important not to make assumptions about the girls and moms that come to the American Girl store, says Crispell. While the store's employees can't know what customers are thinking and feeling, they can always try to deliver a consistency and delight with every customer interaction, he says.
And similarly, real healthcare organizations can create memorable experiences for patients and family members that are only as good as the engagement levels of their employees. This reality presents a special challenge to senior leaders who want to change the perceptions of healthcare organizations as cold and emotionally sterile places of last resort.
With continual media coverage of gloom and doom stories of healthcare organizations and the industry as a whole, leaders need to keep fighting against negative perceptions, says Thomas Wright, president and CEO of Delnor-Community Hospital. Just as it is important to have systems in place to identify medical errors, Wright points out that hospital leaders should work to catch team members in the act of doing great things, recognize those extra efforts of employees living the values of the organization, and then share those stories with employees.
In just one of many examples that panelists shared with conference attendees, Wright told the story of a patient's mother who sought him out to thank him for the extra efforts by his staff to find a rag that had been tossed out as trash. This tattered cloth was a comfort to her disabled son who having surgery at the hospital, and she knew how much her son would need it after his procedure. Tearing up, she told Wright how committed the staff was to find this rag for her and her son.
Leaders who make the patient experience a priority for the organization and promote this type of story often help to create staff engagement that becomes part of the organization's culture, says Sonia Rhodes, vice president of customer strategy for Sharp HealthCare.
The San Diego health system has a program that Rhodes calls "first touch" in which employees try to establish a human connection with patients within the first three minutes of their interaction. She says that perhaps more important than sharing information with patients, it is essential to gather information that can help staff deliver a memorable experience. A great and unique patient experience will happen when team members can note something important about the patient, share it with other team members, and then act on it throughout the patient's interaction with the hospital, says Rhodes.
Efforts to enhance the patient experience can have detractors who cynically view such efforts as "flavor-of-the-month" programs that do little to improve healthcare outcomes. In particular, panel members noted that resistance by some physicians can be expected. Bridget Duffy, MD, principal at DS Health Care Consulting, says that when she was the chief experience officer of the Cleveland Clinic, a surgeon complained about the program by telling her that his patients should feel lucky to just be able to get up of the operating table and walk.
Duffy and Wright agree that leaders should never give up on engaging physicians in efforts to improve patient experiences. Wright says that his hospital's obstetricians were the first to participate in his program and, over time, medical staff members began to police each other's behaviors and promote Delnor's program.
"The person you least expect will rise up and become a champion," Wright says. "My biggest breakthrough was with a neurosurgeon who had been a frequent user of our physician disruption program." Wright says that through his hospital's ongoing patient experience program this highly engaged doctor eventually learned that he didn't have to be critical all the time and now this surgeon makes a point to often bring an OR nurse with him to have post-procedure discussions with patients and family members.
Rhodes says that the leadership at Sharp made a conscious choice to focus on employees first before engaging physicians so that they could see how the patient experience program improved the organization.
Aurelia Boyer, vice president and chief information officer for New York-Presbyterian Hospital says that including patient satisfaction data in the dashboard that hospital leadership reviews fortnightly also helps to move patient experience efforts forward because employees and physicians can see steady improvement over time. She also points that sharing health records with patients can not only enhance the experience, but it can also improve health literacy, coordination, and outcomes. "If people want to use PatientsLikeMe, we will help facilitate them into that new electronic world," says Boyer.