Healthcare Experience Foundation
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Adding heart and humanity to healthcare.
Outcomes and experiences that stand out.
When organizations create experiences that stand out, they are able to drastically improve their patient and employee outcomes.
For one health system in Tucson, Arizona, that included improving PX scores on average by 20 percentile points over a period of six months.
Making Healing Human Again
Challenge
For this Arizona-based health system, senior leadership turnover was high, dropping patient scores fueled low morale and employee experience scores. Leadership was caught between managing the reputation of the organization with working toward elevating the employee performance culture to boost PX scores.
Amidst a flu epidemic, it was apparent that change was needed to shift not just the culture of the organization, but change the way patients received their care.
Solution
Over the course of a 12-month engagement, our team worked with organization leaders and teams to conduct onsite assessments, interviews with senior leader teams, and focus groups with staff and physicians. Combined with departmental observations, our team co-created a roadmap for improvement to bring the organization back into alignment with its values, its vision, and its culture.
Our roadmap identified the following areas of focus:
- Improve senior leader communication, visibility and rounding strategies.
- Focus on leadership development for engaging and sustaining change initiatives among their teams.
- Engage high performing staff and physicians in revitalizing and maximizing standards of performance that would ultimately define Best Practices for the organization.
- Creation of a Patient Experience Council to implement and launch the newly established Standards of Performance throughout the organization.
- Implementation of the CARES™ Model for improved patient experience and communication.
- Implementation of clinician and physician leader coaching to support sustaining performance cultures.
- HCAHPS workshops to improve specific domains.
Results
As a result of both implementation of the road map and the organization leadership’s commitment, the system saw 20% improvement in PX scores. Notably, hourly rounding, nurse leader rounding and bedside shift reports increased drastically.
8%
25% to 17%
RN Turnover Decreased, with total turnover decreased from 24% to 19%.
44%
4th to 58th Percentile
A fifty four percentile point increase for Nurse Leader Rounding improvement.
32%
32 Percentile Point Increase
Marked increased in how patients perceived doctor’s attentiveness (“Doctors listened carefully”)
34%
34 percentile point increase
Marked increase in patient’s perception of timeliness from nurse teams (“Timely response to call button”)
68%
68 percentile point increase
Significant increase in patient’s perception of nurse communication (“Explanation of new medications”)
48%
48 percentile point increase
Marked increase in patient’s perception of nurse communication (“Description of new med side effects”)
41%
41 percentile point increase
Marked increase in clinician communications (“Post discharge help discussion”)