Delivering a better patient experience is a top priority for hospitals over the next three years, according to new research, but their success in doing that is both driven and stifled by hospital leadership.
The Beryl Institute, a global community for improving patient experience, teamed up with Catalyst Healthcare Research to survey 1,072 hospital leaders from nearly 700 organizations across the United States.
They found that most organizations feel good about their progress in this area, but not quite as good as they felt two years ago, when the last The State of Patient Experience benchmark study was done. “For me, that’s actually a bit encouraging,” said Beryl Institute Executive Director Jason Wolf in a recorded presentation at Patient Experience Conference 2013. “It means we’re doing the hard work, and did anyone ever say that hard work was easy?”
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The fact that 25 percent of the survey’s respondents were chief experience officers is a sign of progress in itself, Wolf noted. In the 2011 survey, only 14 percent had that title. But overall, hospitals are still lacking in staff devoted to patient experience. Less than a quarter reported having someone whose time was 100 percent devoted to PX, and two-thirds said they had a staff or committees of three or fewer people.
And according to hospitals, the importance of supportive leadership can’t be underplayed. Respondents ranked strong, visible support from the top and having clinical managers who visibly support PX efforts as key drivers of success. They also listed their top roadblock as having leaders appointed to drive PX being pulled in too many directions at once.
Another sign of progress that emerged from the survey was that 81 percent of organizations said they had formal structures for addressing patient experience. Those include sharing patient experience scores, having clinical team members make hourly/regular roundings, having members of senior management make regular roundings, and conducting staff training programs.
Although hospitals reported that general cultural resistance to doing things differently was down, they still expressed that better HCAHPS scores were the biggest motivator for improving patient experience–not a better reputation or a shift toward population health. That came through in the priorities they listed for improving experience: reduced noise levels, hourly rounding and pain management–the same priorities they listed in 2011.
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“What do (these) remind you of? HCAHPS domains,” Wolf noted. “So we’re still in that realm. It’s a guidance, but we have some huge opportunities to get beyond reduced noise to figuring out what are all of the comprehensive components of our efforts in terms of priorities.”
[Word cloud from The Beryl Institute/Catalyst Healthcare Research report]
