Jack Stockert, mangaging director, Health2047; Sven Gierlinger, CXO, Northwell Health; Alan Dubovsky, Chief Patient Experience Officer, Cedars Sinai; and Adrienne Boissy, CXO, Cleveland Clinic, participate at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas last week. (left to right)
Last week at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas, Sven Gierlinger, chief experience officer at Northwell Health, recalled his first days at Henry Ford Health System in Michigan around a decade ago.
“I said, we should really talk about the patient like they are a customer…They almost ran me out of the building. Today, that’s a different story.”
Gierlinger was a panelist with two other chief patient experience officers from marquee hospitals who were describing how the country is entering a new era of patient engagement. The track was hosted by MedCity News.
Adrienne Boissy, chief experience officer at Cleveland Clinic came armed with a five-year patient engagement plan.
The system wants to double the number of patients it reaches, provide more virtual care and standardize the experience at all sites.
“We want to get clear the standards we have across the enterprise, whether it’s London, Abu Dhabi or Cleveland Ohio,” said Boissy. “You should experience the same brand, the same level of service.”
The Clinic is changing how it assesses patient attitudes, trimming the number of surveys it offers from 25 to five and focusing on net promoter score, teamwork, empathy, communication and need. In addition, hospital executives are trying to simplify the financial journey and develop better predictive models.
“I should know that you hate chocolate shakes, but you say you love educational videos, yet you’ve never watched them,” said Boissy.
Alan Dubovsky, chief patient experience officer at Cedars-Sinai, followed up by noting that systems think they know what patients want to tell them but may not have any idea.
“I really think, when we think about our consumer, we are chasing things that we think are important to them,” he said. “I’m not sure we are.”
At Cedars, changing the approach has required some cultural changes, starting with convincing the community that patient experience is important to begin with. There are other challenges, such as providing care in a 50-year-old building filled with patients.
“We have 890 beds and, the other day, we had a census of 970 patients,” said Dubovsky. “They’re all in clinically appropriate areas, but it’s just not a great patient experience.”
Gierlinger is also contending with how to deliver a good experience even though with 23 hospitals, Northwell is a huge organization. He wants to make it feel small and intimate. Patients are focused on the experience they are having at that moment – in an exam room, a hospital bed, checking in for an appointment.
Jack Stockert, managing director at Health2047 and who was the panel moderator, asked them to share some examples to illustrate their feelings about enhancing the patient experience. Dubovsky offered a quote from a former head of spiritual care, underscoring health’s transitory nature: “Cedars Sinai is a place where the temporarily well take care of the temporarily unwell.”
Boissy talked about one of her multiple sclerosis patients, who had been hospitalized for an infection. She found him crying in his room and soon learned his son had been killed but was still on life support at another Cleveland hospital. She had the son transferred so her patient could say goodbye.
“This is about recognizing the work we do is incredibly human, and it haunts people,” said Boissy. “Whether it’s cool technology or simply recognizing that we have human beings delivering human being care, we will go much further, faster.”
In keeping with the conference’s attention towards precision medicine, Dubovsky discussed precision engagement.
“We’ve convinced ourselves that every single patient discharge from our facility needs the exact same survey at the exact same time with the exact same questions…It just makes no sense.”
He wants to reverse-engineer this approach, starting with the patients and determining which questions are most appropriate for a woman who just delivered a baby or someone with stage 4 cancer.
The panel agreed they have a long way to go, but expressed optimism that cultures are changing and they will ultimately get there.
“So, for the first time we have a clearly articulated strategy about what we’re hoping to accomplish,” said Boissy. “I feel a tremendous amount of hope around all of us…united around what we’re hoping to accomplish in this strategy and then building it out.”
