Patient experience from the outside in
Check out the Q2 snapshots highlighting how we put Human Understanding® into practice.
June’s nSight
How to move the HCAHPS needle
Early on, HCAHPS served as a focusing mechanism that sparked considerable improvement by positioning patient experience as a key element of overall quality. Despite the time, energy, and money devoted to HCAHPS at a national level, scores plateaued around 2017—years before the onset of the pandemic—perhaps because many organizations had started to focus on scores more than on the behaviors and outcomes that scores were meant to reflect.
In every reporting period since 2007, the HCAHPS composite measures of “Communication with Nurses” and “Communication with Doctors” have been the number-one and number-two key drivers of Hospital Rating. Initiatives geared toward improving communication should focus on treating every patient as unique. Our nSight on The Power of ‘Doing’ Human Understanding shows that at a behavioral level, patients see this as a three-part priority: Connect with me, Listen to me, and Partner with me.
NRC Health has found four tactics that are proven to move the HCAHPS needle forward: cultivating comments, engaging in nurse leader rounding, automating discharge calls, and accelerating service recovery.
Read the full June nSight report for more on our four proven tactics. To watch the on-demand webcast featuring Susan Edgman-Levitan, PA, Executive Director at the John D. Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Greg Makoul, Ph.D., MS, Chief Transformation Officer at NRC Health, click here.
When PX is Personal
Meet Mandy Reimer of Children’s Mercy Kansas City
For Mandy Riemer, how patient experience is delivered is personal. As a survivor of Stage 4 colorectal cancer, and as Manager of Patient Experience at Children’s Mercy in Kansas City, Riemer brings a unique perspective gained through her personal and professional experiences.
“My diagnosis came out of nowhere,” she says. “I was 37 and otherwise healthy. It took me out of the workforce while also thrusting me into the place I had always been, which is in healthcare—just in a very, very different aspect of healthcare. Because I’ve been both the recipient of care and the one trying to ensure that we provide care most effectively and compassionately, it brought me to a place in my career where patient experience is more of a passion now. This is something that I have to do, and get to do.”
Riemer’s cancer metastasized to her liver, and her treatment required an intense series of chemotherapy, 28 sessions of radiation, and “the mother of all surgeries,” which required a lengthy recovery process followed by adjuvant chemotherapy. She says there were times in the process when it felt like her healthcare team was a beautiful orchestra of people working together, all for her—which was an incredible feeling that inspired tremendous gratitude in her. But she also occasionally experienced the other side, of providers not understanding the value of Human Understanding.
Read more of Reimer’s story and learn why she believes that the information and trust built in the listening process are worth everything to a healthcare system. Don’t miss Reimer’s interview on Becker Hospital Review’s podcast with Evan Sheaff, NRC Health’s AVP of Customer Strategy, as they discuss how Children’s Mercy is finding out what patients want most, what key trends they are seeing in patient experience, and how overburdened clinicians and staff can focus on personal connections.
HUB23: “Patient Experience Holds the Key to Achieving Health Equity”
Racism in healthcare is a public health issue. Correspondingly, the delivery of equitable care is imperative for all healthcare systems. This talk will focus on how patient experience as a field can lead the way in assessing and expanding equitable care. Patient-experience data can help you identify key disparities, prioritize needs, develop an action plan to address inequities, and monitor progress.
Patient-experience data also has the unique attribute of directly reflecting the patient’s perspective. These insights are key to identifying gaps in the patient experience, resulting in a more inclusive and equitable healthcare environment. In Greco’s HUB 23 mainstage session, you’ll learn the value of setting health-equity goals for leadership and how to identify disparities based on survey data from various resources. Finally, you’ll understand how to create a plan to address identified inequities and methods for monitoring progress toward meeting the needs of diverse patient populations and achieving health equity.
Register for NRC Health’s HUB23
HUB23 will set the stage to improve healthcare experiences for patients, providers, caregiving teams, health systems, and communities. Register today!
The Beryl Institute Podcast
No more pizza: Moving forward with the basics of experience
Toya Gorley, Improvement Advisor at NRC Health, and Greg Makoul, Ph.D., MS, Chief Transformation Officer at NRC Health, recently joined The Beryl Institute’s podcast to discuss how the fundamentals of patient experience drive innovation and improvement in healthcare.
“At NRC Health, we are, I think, leading a movement towards recognition and reward, and having that be an essential part of your patient and family experience strategy,” Gorley says. “We’re making sure that we are using patient feedback to lift up care providers and highlight the great work that they do all of the time, and to use that positive patient feedback as a way to inspire change.”
Compassionate Leadership
Discover how Mission Health creates high workforce engagement
As care providers report record rates of burnout, emphasizing workforce engagement is increasingly important. At Mission Health’s Yates Center Health and Rehab, leaders must understand their frontline care teams to maintain a motivated and dedicated workforce. This approach is yielding impressive results.
In the last three years, Yates Center Health and Rehab saw a 37% top-box score increase in making employee workloads reasonable, and a 33% top-box score increase in creating employee opportunities—an exceptional achievement for any organization, especially through COVID.
Yates Center Health and Rehab offers 24/7 nursing care to long-term and short-stay residents, with specialized programs such as orthopedic care, cardiac and pulmonary management, wound-care management, and IV therapy. They also offer physical therapy, occupational speech therapy, tailored activities, social services, dining/meal services, housekeeping, laundry, and spiritual enrichment.
“I think workforce engagement is about understanding what drives our employees, their struggles, and what they celebrate,” says Nicki Jacobs, a Yates Center Health and Rehab administrator. “Just understanding them creates that engagement. They feel valued, they feel worthy, and they matter. They feel their work matters.”
For ideas to implement, learn more about Mission Health’s Top 10 Employee Engagement Strategies.
