As medical communities continually strive to meet the needs of an ever-changing patient population, there’s been a greater focus on the ‘patient experience’ – an industry movement to define and improve the human experience within healthcare.
Jamie Di Piazza-Rodriguez, MSW, CPXP, is the manager of patient experience for Saint Francis Health System in Tulsa. Her department is relatively new, put in place two years ago, and it works with Warren Clinic and all Saint Francis hospital locations.
“We partner with the Beryl Institute, and they define the patient experience as the sum of all interactions, shaped by an organization’s culture, that influence patient perceptions across the continuum of care – and I like to say it’s the people that make the culture,” says Di Piazza-Rodriguez. “The patient experience encompasses a lot; we look at all the processes our patients face, from when they drive into the parking lot and throughout the entire journey they take within our health system.”
She says there are many ways her department gains the patient perspective, including regular collaboration with a patient family advisory council.
“Our patient family advisory council consists of patients, their family members and employees,” says Di Piazza-Rodriguez. “We gather and listen to their concerns and ideas. It welcomes discussion and helps us make changes that improve their care. For instance, our patients expressed that it was often difficult to make the long walk from the parking lot to the hospital, so we added valet and golf carts at some locations to meet this need.”
She also emphasizes that the surveys that patients complete don’t fall into a void – instead, they are reviewed and studied to help shape processes and develop tangible solutions.
“We look closely at the data to hear the voices of our patients,” she says, explaining that patients have the opportunity to participate in an exit survey after being discharged. “But we also partner with frontline staff, as well as employees within our system. Our departments have what we call unit-based councils, made up of leaders within the department. We work directly with them to learn what patients are saying and also how processes affect their work. Our goal is to work together to potentially elevate their communications or bring best practices to the forefront to help and empower their team.”
The ‘patient experience’ concept began over a decade ago and is now predominantly accepted as its own dimension of healthcare quality. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the lead federal agency charged with improving the safety and quality of healthcare for all Americans, recognizes the patient experience as an integral component of quality healthcare, citing it as a key step to more patient-centered care. In addition, it offers an explanation of the difference between patient experience and patient satisfaction – two terms often used interchangeably but that are fundamentally different.
According to AHRQ, “to assess patient experience, one must find out from patients whether something that should happen in a healthcare setting – such as clear communication with a provider – actually happened, or how often it happened. Patient satisfaction, on the other hand, is about whether a patient’s expectations about a health encounter were met.”
While two people can receive the same exact care, they may express different levels of satisfaction based upon their individual expectations. As a simple example, one patient may have expected less pain and a shorter procedure while another patient expected more pain and a longer procedure.
“Addressing the patient experience is a powerful thing,” says Di Piazza-Rodriguez. “The patients we treat are everything to their loved ones, so they want the best for them and so do we. It’s a privilege to take care of someone’s ‘everything.’ It’s a very exciting time as healthcare is changing and evolving for the benefit of our patients.”
