Healthcare providers are well aware that the industry’s burnout crisis is having a disastrous effect on staffing levels. In fact, some researchers predict that up to 75% of healthcare employees will leave the field by 2025. A new initiative from software company Feedtrail seeks to make healthcare workers feel more satisfied in their roles by connecting them with messages of patient gratitude.
Feedtrail — a Raleigh-based company focused on patient feedback — launched a clinician retention workgroup on Monday that is designed to streamline the process of ensuring that employees are aware of positive patient feedback.
“Historically, the culture of patient experience surveying has been focused on identifying opportunities for improvement and uncovering patient concerns, rather than identifying and highlighting the positive aspects of patient experiences,” said Paul Jaglowski, Feedtrail’s co-founder and chief strategy officer.
Feedtrail’s internal data has found that more than 80% of patient experiences are “very positive in nature,” but healthcare workers rarely hear that positive reinforcement, Jaglowski declared. But hearing praise directly from patients and families “can have a dramatic impact on a caregivers’ well-being and serve as a reminder of why they got into healthcare in the first place,” he said.
The workgroup is slated to last six months with the hopes that providers will then extend the program across their enterprises. The first cohort includes four providers: Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, Texas Tech Physicians in Lubbock, and FirstHealth of the Carolinas in Pinehurst, North Carolina.
Each participating organization identified one or two units where burnout has historically been a challenge. Some of these include the emergency department, urgent care and physician clinics.
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“Our goal was to focus initial implementation in areas where there was the most room for immediate impact,” Jaglowski said. “Following the initial six-month program, the expectation is that the organizations will expand this gratitude program across their footprints.”
Providers will use Feedtrail’s platform to collect patient feedback and funnel messages of gratitude back to caregivers.
At the end of each week, Feedtrail’s platform will automatically send a text with a link to a two-question survey to each patient who received care over that week, Jaglowski explained. The first question asks patients if there is an individual staff member they would like to recognize, and the second question asks them what they would specifically like to recognize about their interaction with this caregiver.
Feedtrail’s platform shares patient gratitude directly with clinicians on a weekly basis through smartphone, email and employee portals, Jaglowski said.
The program goes beyond simply collecting positive patient feedback and routing it to healthcare workers.
At the start of this program, providers will also electronically deploy a simple three-question baseline survey across clinician participants to establish a “satisfaction baseline,” Jaglowski explained. Questions will focus on employees’ current satisfaction with their role, opinion about how often they receive positive patient comments, and whether they would recommend their organization as an employer to their family and friends, he said.
Sixty-day pulse surveys will then be deployed to measure progress against clinicians’ initial satisfaction baseline as the program goes on.
The employee satisfaction surveys will help Feedtrail demonstrate the quantitative impact of real time kudos for clinicians, as well as show the ROI of hospital investments in patient experience initiatives, Jaglowski said.
“The treasure trove of patient gratitude and appreciation rarely makes it into clinician hands due to lack of communication tools in departments or the fast pace of the industry,” he declared. “We believe sharing positive patient comments in real-time is an untapped opportunity to battle clinician burnout and support retention.”
Photo: imtmphoto, Getty Images
