NRC Health recently interviewed several nationally recognized healthcare leaders on the critical role Human Understanding plays in healthcare to drive growth, personalize care, build trust, drive loyalty and equity, transform services, and help organizations exceed expectations. Here’s what leaders had to say about creating unique connections.

Q. How does NRC Health enable your organization to create unique connections with each patient?

Making Connections through patient Feedback

“ChristianaCare’s partnership with NRC Health really helps us create a connection with each patient and family through real-time understanding,” says Mike Puchtler, Vice President of Patient Experience at Christiana Care Health System. “Through the quantitative data and the patient narrative in the comments, that whole process, of being able to access that level of insight from our patients in real time, is extraordinarily valuable.”

Puchtler says Christiana Care’s team members who are deploying process-improvement initiatives have the opportunity to use that information to enhance the experience of their patients.

“Building relationships is a key principle of our Orlando Health way,” says Ken Kozielski, Vice President of Customer Experience at Orlando Health. “Our partnership with NRC Health really enables us to do that, because it’s transformed our measurement program away from being a reactionary, after-the-fact, lagging indicator.”

Kozielski says that the change to NRC Health’s patient feedback capabilities has been an operational tool that helps the organization engage in real time, and that Orlando Health has embraced the alert feature. “We have over 900 alert owners who receive those alerts,” he says. “They make phone calls, and they’re out there building relationships with our patients.”

Fostering Community from Insights

“I think there’s a lot of ways in which the partnership between NRC Health and Nemours really benefits human understanding,” says Peggy Greco, Ph.D., Medical Director of Patient Experience at Nemours Children’s Health. “NRC Health has allowed us, through the portal, to have some special tools, and to look at responses by demographic data—looking at race, language, and ethnicity, and ensuring that our patients and families are represented fully. If we really want human understanding, we have tools that allow us to assess not only whether we have representative information, but how the experience varies based on those demographic groups.”

Greco says that this process has allowed them to change their strategy to target those disparities. “I would say our partnership with NRC Health has really allowed us to get broader input from our families through the community insights platform, which has grown to include 11,000 families,” she says. “We have recently submitted a survey on fairness and been able to gather very diverse opinions on what fairness is like for the patients and families who experience us.”
Jennifer Baron, CPXP, Chief Experience Officer at UC Davis Health, says the organization is partnering to lift a patient and family community through the NRC Health’s patient experience solution.

“I’m really excited to be able to understand things beyond the feedback that we’re getting from our patient-experience surveys,” she says. “I really want to understand what’s most important to our patients and families, to know how we can design meaningful experiences that will impact and support them in their lives. And I think that’s really what this partnership and that community will be able to do for us.”

Looking at Attributes to Better Understand Market Insights

“We really take a look at the Market Insights that we get from NRC, especially the attributes, to understand what people see, think, and feel about us, because everything is really wrapped up in your brand experience,” says Steve Telliano, M.A., Assistant Vice Chancellor of Strategic Communications for UC Davis Health.

Telliano says that they get plenty of anecdotal information by interviewing people and holding focus groups. He says that looking at the information in the aggregate and getting the big picture is also important to understand the public and market perceptions.

“We look at the market, tracking data, but with the NRC data, we dive into the attributes to understand and break apart why people feel the way they feel, and what are the perceptions behind the perceptions, so that we can truly understand where people are in relation to UC Davis Health,” he says. “This helps us look for things that we can improve, so that we’re bettering human understanding and the patient experience.”

Telliano emphasizes that the use of market-research data—and especially data like Market Insights provides—is incredibly important for today’s healthcare environment. It can be very easy to become inwardly focused, or just to become focused on the delivery of care, because that’s really what’s important. But how you deliver care and how people perceive your organization are equally important, because that’s what the future is. “I think that it’s critically important that people spend the time to understand the research, pull the data out of it, and see what it’s telling them,” he says. “Because if you don’t, you really run the risk of going the wrong direction.”