At PRC, we go beyond simply measuring patient experience. We believe every patient deserves an excellent healthcare journey, which is why we work with our clients to enhance their patient experience initiatives through a multi-pronged process of solutions and support. Our End-to-End philosophy recognizes that improving the patient’s healthcare experience requires a holistic mentality that takes multiple perspectives of care into consideration. The following steps illustrate how PRC clients leverage these insights to plan and implement meaningful improvement in their patient experience initiatives.
Engage Your Care Teams & Providers
Like the “it takes a village” proverb, it takes a team of dedicated, engaged employees and physicians to create a meaningful patient experience. In that regard, providing an excellent work and practice environment for your care teams to thrive becomes the foundation to providing an excellent patient experience. Our National Nursing Study revealed positive correlations between nursing engagement and several HCAHPS dimensions. Further, engaging your employees not only creates an efficient working environment; it also inspires emotional investment in their work and your organizational culture. Engagement is the catalyst for employee retention, physician alignment and referrals, and dedication to patient well-being. Therefore, it’s crucial that organizations support the people who make an excellent patient experience possible by acting on these key insights. To achieve a workplace of highly engaged care teams and providers, you need to have a true understanding of their perceptions of their work environment. With these perceptions, you can develop and implement an action plan that addresses their needs and concerns.
Explore PRC’s Employee and Physician Solutions to learn more about how we help clients transform unengaged employees into fully engaged team members.
Make Meaningful Rounds
Rounding is a common patient experience best practice, but one that not all organizations get the full value out of completing. For some care teams, rounding becomes nothing more than a means to check a box or follow a routine, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Meaningful rounding is intentional in improving the care experience—anyone participating should be able to answer the question, “what are we hoping to accomplish with these rounds?” at any point. Meaningful rounding is also dynamic, with the areas of focus continually evolving based on the opportunities for improvement captured in your latest patient experience data (along with insights uncovered during the rounds themselves).
Relationship Rounds™, our latest innovation in patient experience support, was created in partnership with the Healthcare Experience Foundation to help our clients plan their rounding with such intentionality and dynamics. Through a platform complete with reporting, 1:1 coaching, and best practice resources, we’re committed to helping our clients modernize their rounding and ensure their rounds make a tangible difference in their patients’ care.
Read our official Relationship Rounds™ announcement.
Ensure a Safe Transition Home
Some people may think the patient experience ends when they leave the hospital, but this cannot be further from the truth. In fact, an excellent patient experience can be marred by a poor transition home or safety complications resulting in readmission, the latter especially costly to hospitals. This inspires some organizations to implement some form of post-discharge calling or communication.
While an effective best practice, many of these efforts fall short when the calls are relegated to using IVR technology that leaves your patients with cold and impersonal “communication” as the final touchpoint of their care. Other organizations avoid this issue by instructing their care teams to provide post discharge calls, but this approach comes with its own set of hidden costs surrounding time and resources. That’s why our CARES™ Connect discharge solution utilizes a dedicated team of in-house call center agents to lead personal outreach with compassionate calls that identify safety risks before they become readmissions and display dedication to your patients’ well-being outside of the hospital, altogether ending the patient experience on a high note.
View a client’s presentation detailing their CARES™ Connect utilization.
Capture Your Patient Perceptions
For some organizations, improvement can come simply with a re-evaluation of how they collect their patient data.
To truly capture your patient perceptions, you need to make sure your organization surveys a representative sample. Where any survey will garner the attention of individuals with strong opinions—positive or negative—higher response rates mean you capture the feedback of all patients that receive care at your organization, not just the motivated ones. In action, higher response rates provide your team with a more representative sample of your patient perceptions that improves accuracy in your data, something especially important when defining improvement initiatives.
Further, research illustrates a positive correlation between response rates and HCAHPS scores. This is accomplished through reaching an ever-important “silently satisfied” segment of patients who have a positive perception of care but wouldn’t otherwise be compelled to share their experience. With PRC clients seeing an average 35% HCAHPS response rate compared to the national average of 22%, what can higher response rates mean for you?
Contact us at [email protected] to schedule a 1:1 call with a PRC expert and take the next step in driving your organization towards healthcare excellence.