UNDERSTANDING THE DRIVERS OF THE PATIENT EXPERIENCE

Many Long Term Care Facilities, are implementing a variety of strategies to improve the patient experience —an issue that’s rapidly becoming a top priority in health care. The Accountable Care Act now links performance related to patient-experience metrics to reimbursement. For the first time, the pay of Long Term Care Facilities and eventually individual providers will be partly based on how they are rated by patients. Few disagree on the importance and the need to be more patient centric, but what exactly is the “patient experience”? A industry survey asked top leaders of Long Term Care Facilities (CEOs, COOs, and others) what was necessary to improve the patient experience. The top six recommendations included: new facilities, private rooms, food on demand, unrestricted visiting hours, and more quiet time so patients could rest. There was one problem with them: They were not based on a systematic examination of what most patients really wanted. In other words, the executives wanted to focus on what they felt were important drivers of the patient experience but didn’t know for sure. To truly improve the patient experience, it is important to get the patient’s perspective.

For example, consider a patient who consistently uses the health care system, someone with multiple, chronic medical conditions that remain incurable and are only treatable from a maintenance standpoint. If he doesn’t feel that his caregivers are compassionate, that may heavily influence his overall perception of the experience. Since his relationship with health care givers is more prolonged (or permanent), he may need more of the “human side” of caring. Why is it important for caregivers to know the drivers of patient experience? First, not being clear about the drivers can often be a significant barrier to launching a patient-experience initiative. Second, knowing the drivers helps leaders identify the most effective ways to achieve quick victories. Third, the economics of the levers is quite different. Improving some of these dimensions (such as providing private rooms) would be cost prohibitive for most Long Term Care Facilities. Others (such as improving communication between patients and caregivers) could reduce the overall cost of providing health care and also improve medical outcomes. Faced with the task of understanding the drivers of patient experience, health care organizations have taken — and can take — multiple approaches to discerning the drivers of patient experience. Below, we review briefly some of the innovative approaches to better understand patient needs that have been tried in various organizations

Create patient advisory councils. A very simple but effective approach in many contexts is to identify a group of patients that can act as the customers’ “voice” within the organizations. It is easy for an organization to lose touch with its customers’ evolving needs. Today, Voice of the Patient Advisory Councils are used to ensure that the organization does not lose track of patients’ needs. Councils have assisted with redesigning waiting rooms, providing advice on improving the admission guide, and helping managers better understand communication needs in the facility. Dig deeper into patients’ experiences. Long Term Care Facilities can use data from the Care Analytics Assessment Platform— the patient-satisfaction surveys conducted compare how their performance compares with that of other U.S. Long Term Care Facilities. Long Term Care Facilities can leverage the data better by both digging deeper into the data and paying attention to anecdotal comments and complaints. This allows Long Term Care Facilities to understand not only how their patients feel about their experience but also why they felt the way they did.

Have leaders make regular rounds. At Premier Long Term Care Facilities across the country, senior make a habit of wandering throughout the Facility and talking to patients, their families, and caregivers (including physicians, nurses, food-service workers, and environmental-service workers who clean the rooms. These rounds need to be done on a regular basis and at least once a month. Such direct contact provides leaders with a firsthand understanding of patient needs. Leaders of health care organizations in recent years have focused primarily on delivering superior medical outcomes at lower costs. In addition, they also need to focus on improving the patient experience. A poor experience compromises a facilities reputation among patients and other physicians and adversely affects employees’ engagement levels. Moreover, with the changes in the reimbursement policies in many countries, it can have a negative impact on a facilities economics. But improving the patient experience will be hard to do without a better understanding of what patients really want. We hope others will offer comments and share what they’ve learned from their own efforts to understand what drives patient satisfaction.

Care Analytics is a tablet-based software that assesses Long Term Care Facilities and provides feedback to make quality improvements for patient satisfaction in real time.

To advance the patient experience, providers must understand patient needs and address targeted opportunities within patient populations. Care Analytics provides meaningful and actionable insights into every aspect of patient perception. We work with facilities across the globe to collect feedback through real-time point of care tablet based assessments. We provide straight-forward steps focusing on the key drivers of exceptional patient experiences. Our model is based on the marriage of big data and years of experience with improving patient satisfaction

UNLEASH TARGETED INSIGHTS THROUGH ADVANCED ANALYTICS

CONTACT US

www.careanalytics.net

twitter.com/careanalytic

facebook.com/careanalytics