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GfK Healthcare | December 2010 | |
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The Growing Importance of “Patient Experience”  A couple of days ago, I was talking to a good friend of mine, the highly knowledgeable executive recruiter Gayle Parker, about some thinking I had been doing lately related to the concept of “patient experience.” My thoughts were prompted by a commercial I’d seen aired several times on network TV by Merck. In this commercial, various individuals offer up sound bites indicating that they are not a demographic, a statistic, a target market or even a patient. Rather, they are people who happen to have Type 2 diabetes. The message of their collective protestation was clear. They were tired of being dealt with impersonally, of having their condition treated rather than themselves, and they wanted to have a much warmer experience surround their treatment process. Voice-over at the end of the commercial makes it clear that Merck is not only working on medications but also the patient experience. Gayle resonated to this line of discussion, since her daughter is part of the staff at the Cleveland Clinic and had mentioned to her mother that that institution proudly has an Office of Patient Experience. More substantively, patient experience is one of the clinic’s major strategic goals; it has appointed a chief experience officer; and has mounted a number of programs to enhance the physical, emotional and spiritual nature of everyone – patients, caregivers and families alike – who passes through the medical center. Cleveland Clinic’s efforts in this regard, it should be noted, are in no way to be confused with patient satisfaction programs, which focus more on metrics for measuring, post facto, the macro experience than on programs meant to ensure, a priori, that every aspect and detail of the patient’s experience is a positive one. To get a more up close and personal feeling for the sincerity of its approach, Google Cleveland Clinic and look in the Home Page search engine for Patient Experience. There you will see described, in great depth and with well-founded pride, many of the programs that have been instituted to ensure that staff members and the facilities that support them not only talk the talk, but walk the walk, of the clinic’s mantra, i.e., patient first. Exemplary of the clinic’s beginning-to-end focus on the patient’s experience is the Patient Service Navigator program. This program appoints an ombudsman/woman for each patient and his/her family. Unlike many institutions, in which patients are unceremoniously led into their rooms virtually without comment, at Cleveland Clinic the PSN briefs the patient on the organization and schedule of the unit to which he or she is being admitted, and even tells the patient’s family about parking, food availability and other seemingly trivial but extremely important matters. During the patient’s stay, if issues arise, the PSN is the patient’s single point of contact for going to bat with whatever department(s) are necessary to resolve the problem. The Healing Services Program is literally and figuratively a more touchy-feely approach to patient care. Under the Patient Experience Department’s banner, this program recognizes the value of not just dealing with the patient’s presenting problem, but dealing instead with the whole patient, including spiritual, physical and psychological needs for comfort. A cadre of chaplains, holistic nurses and even massage therapists cater to needs of the patient for holistic care, an approach that has been shown to improve both patient experience and clinical outcome. Everyone who watches the myriad medical shows on TV, from the cerebral and cynical House to the cutesy Grey’s Anatomy, is familiar with the term code red, which is used to gather together, at full speed, a package of professionals and equipment necessary to improve the chances of survival of a patient who is crashing. As part of the Healing Services Program, Cleveland Clinic has instituted a variant of this approach that is referred to as “code lavender.” This term, and its corresponding approach, is utilized when a patient or a member of his/her care system is crashing psychologically and/or spiritually and is in immediate need of additional support. The passing of a loved one, for example, is virtually an automatic clue for a member of the Healing Services Program to call a code lavender for those left behind. Voice of The Patient Advisory Panels, on the other hand, are basically ongoing focus groups in which staff members, patients and their families alike can make suggestions and debate the merits of new approaches to improving the patient experience. Such innovation and feedback is clearly an essential component of any genuinely patient-focused approach to care. On a different note, the Respond With H.E.A.R.T.™ program provides staff training in the art and science of improving the patient experience. Most practitioners, after all, have been trained to provide disease-focused treatment, with little attention being paid during their training programs to the importance of, or techniques for, providing empathy. In such ways, Cleveland Clinic has assembled special training modules for its various types and levels of staff, each of which constitutes a how-to in improving the patient experience. The Patient Experience Program also includes the Exceptional Healing Partners initiative, designed to recognize staff associates who have demonstrated excellence in contributing to the positive patient experience. Such recognition obviously underscores and personalizes the importance that Cleveland Clinic places on patient experience. Change gears! While the above discussion has focused on the patient experience in the hospital setting, and limited its purview to the Cleveland Clinic at that, it is clear that the importance of improving the holistic patient experience transcends that venue, applying in fact to every situation in which patient care is being provided. The rapidly emerging pharmacy-based clinics, for example, will clearly thrive or fail depending in no small part on the patient experiences they provide. Home care for the elderly, which will clearly gain in popularity as the graying of America makes institutional care in the last years of life cost-prohibitive, constitutes a vast new arena for developing a holistic patient experience focus. Coming full circle, the Merck commercial has it spot on! Nobody wants to be treated like a diabetes patient. Rather, everybody wants to be treated like a person who happens to have diabetes. Substantial work remains to be done in rolling out this vision in support of such clinical efforts as enhancing patient persistence, where it is far more likely that a positive experience will keep patients on their medications than threatening them with dire outcomes of noncompliance. In summary, it is my belief and genuine desire that patient experience will play an ever increasing role in health care, and that the frontline practitioners and the industries that support them will have to do a much better job than we have historically done in this all-important area. As a psychologist and as a researcher, I look forward to contributing to this important task. I hope you will join me.  Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. Strategic Advisor, GfK Healthcare   |