In the new healthcare, leaders of hospitals and health systems are increasingly realizing the importance of improving the patient experience. This has been especially critical in the era of COVID-19, as patients want transparency around an organization’s sanitary and safety protocols, while also having access to up-to-date information about the evolving pandemic, and the ability to make virtual care appointments.
These trends were outlined in a recent report from Accenture, which found that two out of three patients are likely to switch to a new healthcare provider if their expectations for managing COVID-19 are not met. Based on a survey of more than 4,600 U.S. respondents, the report, “Elevating the Patient Experience to Fuel Growth” concluded that patients are looking for a safer, more secure and convenient healthcare experience.
To help fill this gap, hospital and health system leaders have been turning to adding chief patient experience officers to their C-suites. The precise role of this person might vary some from one place to the next, but broadly, he or she is focused on fostering a culture of patient-centered care.
Many chief patient experience officers have backgrounds outside of healthcare, including in retail or other consumer-focused industries. At the 23-hospital Intermountain Healthcare, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, however, Mike Woodruff, M.D., has been a practicing physician for two decades. Woodruff, who recently took over as Intermountain’s chief patient experience officer, spoke with Healthcare Innovation about his role, what’s changed in the COVID-19 era, and how Intermountain measures success on its ability to enhance the patient experience. Below are excerpts of that discussion.
What does the chief patient experience officer role at Intermountain entail? What are the core responsibilities?
The chief patient experience officer is in charge of the office of patient experience, and that [involves] looking at safety, quality and experience all together. So, the role is a bit of a chief safety officer, plus chief quality officer, plus chief patient experience officer, all together. The reason we combined those was two-fold: healthcare is too complex, for one. Keeping up with quality measures, as well as patient experience and engagement, and patient safety, has traditionally been siloed in a lot of organizations. So if you're a clinician and you have different initiatives pointed at different things and they don't always mesh very well, it ends up being extra work and distraction. One motivation for putting all those three things together in one office under single leadership is that we wanted to simplify things for our caregivers, and get out of their way so that they can keep people healthy, which is why the health system exists.
The second reason is that patients don't think of their engagement with the health system in those silos, and they don't come into the hospital thinking, ‘Boy I hope they keep me safe.’ It’s assumed that we are going to provide safe care at the highest quality and at the lowest possible cost, and what they come away with in the end is the sum total of an experience that we provide. Even for those patients who say they might access the publicly reported measures on the web before they come in for a visit, we have found that less than half of them actually ever do that. They are after the experience of their friends, family and their communities. So we've aligned those functions together and we have really brought the patient voice to the center of our work, and we also are pointed at bringing patients into the design process with us of how we design our work at the health system. We advocate highly for bringing the patient voice to the forefront, as that is ultimately who we're serving.
At the onset of the pandemic, how did patient experience priorities shift for Intermountain?
The first fundamental principle that we identified was that we could not leave our regular work behind. From the very beginning, and I'm quite proud of this, we adhered to who we are as Intermountain: providing evidence-based care that we know works to improve outcomes. For example, in our ICUs we held tight to that, and made sure we were doing all the things that we would do normally. We just had to do them somewhat differently. The same thing applies for how we measured quality; we did not stop reporting our data to ensure that we weren't dropping the ball anywhere.
We also created a thoughtful visitor policy because we knew that this would impact the experience of our patients during the pandemic; all our efforts to keep our caregivers safe—so that they could keep working and keep providing care—by necessity impacted the experience of people coming to our clinics and hospitals. We needed a thoughtful human approach to that, so we collaborated across the system to develop rules that were perhaps not as restrictive as some other places, and that allowed visitors in a way that that everyone felt would be safe as possible, while also allowing some human contact.
We also leaned in on virtual resources to be able to communicate with our patients via iPads and digital platforms for connecting with those individuals who were in our facilities. At the same time, we created a package for our caregivers to support them communicating with patients and families about these difficult times, called Compassionate Connections. When a patient or family member is upset, that adds to the burden of an already busy and overloaded team. So, to the extent we can keep the experience as smooth and as rewarding as possible for our patients and families, actually benefits our caregivers; it’s a happier work environment.
Another important angle here is that Intermountain has a very broad geographic reach, and we support a lot of small, rural communities. For years, we have been working on ways we can help patients get care closer to home. It’s all about value and reducing the cost of care. So [rather than] transporting patients across the state to receive care at one of our large hospitals, can we provide the same level of care for cheaper costs through teleconsultation, tele-ICU services, or tele-behavioral health services? We can bring that expertise when needed into our really small, rural facilities, so that patients can have lower costs of care, but also can have that feeling of staying closer to their family.
How does your team measure progress around patient experience and satisfaction?
For patient experience, we do a number of different surveys. For most of them we partner with Press Ganey, and we do patient experience surveys for almost every encounter we have. We've seen tremendous gains in 2020; in one [scenario], we were quite proud of the telehealth solution we had, because it was compared favorably to others in the healthcare industry, but it was really not a great service since [users] had to go through multiple step logins. We realized that we were negatively impacting the experience of patients and of our caregivers, so we quickly pivoted to what became almost a single-click process for our patients. And that's been a tremendous satisfier for our patients. We have also leveraged technology to sort out the difficult process of arranging testing, and we use that same process for vaccinations where we have users interact with our digital platform, enter their information, and then schedule and secure an appointment all within just a couple of minutes.
We measure everything at Intermountain, and we pride ourselves in our ability to attain high-quality outcomes through measurement and continuous improvement. That has continued through the pandemic and has gotten even more important.
One of the areas where we are really excited to be focusing on is the equity of the care we provide and particularly, how do we ensure we are responding to our communities in ways that minimize leaving certain communities behind? In other words, we can now measure where the needs are for vaccines and where the highest rates of COVID are. We can then intervene in those communities, do outreach, and we can [deploy] mobile testing and mobile vaccination units, as well as other mobile strategies to reach out into communities and make sure that we're not leaving certain populations behind.
