hospitals

Can You Decrease Readmissions By 50%?

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The June 10, 2014 issue of Hospitals & Health Networks (H&HN) contained the article Technology is the key to patient engagement at the individual level. It is worth reading. http://ow.ly/ylgxZ

It got me wondering about how we define engagement, wondering about engaging patients, and about engaged patients. I think engaged patients are the result of different efforts. Most efforts to engage patients stem from efforts made by the hospital.  They tend to be one-way, from the hospital to the patient. They reflect how the hospital feels its patients need to be engaged.  What they miss by not being two-way is a knowledge of how patients feel they need to be engaged with the hospital.

If the engagement were two-way both the patients and the hospitals would benefit.

I believe technology will be key to patient engagement. I think that designed correctly technology should play a major role in reducing readmissions. I also believe that someone should consider asking the patients how technology could help them.

I recently developed a patient access/experience strategy for the call center of a large teaching hospital. One finding was that 99% of all of the patients who asked to speak with a nurse received a voice mail stating that a nurse would get back to them within 48 hours. Because of my fear of large numbers I did not calculate the cost of those callers who went to ED, but it was orders of magnitude higher than the cost of having a nurse or two in the call center. Most of those who went to the ED did not have an emergency. Many simply wanted a refill.

Let’s look for a moment from thirty-thousand feet at how the discharge process works at most hospitals. When I am discharged I sign my discharge orders, and if I am lucky someone from the hospital calls me in a few days to ask how I am doing or feeling. If someone calls me on day three, and my wound opens on day four, or I am feeling sick, or there is a complication from my treatment or from my procedure or from my medication or from something new, what are my likely responses?

I could call the hospital—see above; I could ignore it; or I could go to ED.

If I was unsuccessful previously calling the hospital, I may not even consider that option. If I call, I might speak with someone who could help me, or I could get a busy signal, I could be put on hold, my call could be transferred, or I could be sent to voice mail—see above. Four of those responses are not good for me, and all five may not be good for the hospital.

Why? If I do not get to speak with someone, chances are that I will solve my problem by going to ED. If I do speak with someone they may tell me to go to ED or to the hospital. Chances are good that the hospital is going to incur a cost and record a visit that may
not have been necessary if the hospital had provided me with a technological
alternative.

What might that technology look like?

I see it working something like this.

Before I am discharged the hospital adds me to their discharged patient portal, an interactive portal that contains information about the specifics of my illness or procedure—my meds, their side-effects, complications that could occur and what I should do about them, symptoms that may arise and what I should do about them. The portal also allows me to input data. I can input that I took my medications and any side-effects I am having. I can input any complications, my diet, exercise, BP and pulse, weight, and any
questions I may have.

The system would be designed to alert someone at the hospital each time any of the data I input is outside of the acceptable norms. This way, instead of me playing doctor and determining what I should do, the hospital can act before I act. They can have someone call me, can send a nurse to my home, or can send a physician to my home.

Not every patient will use this technology, but each one who does will not only be doing themselves and the hospital a favor, they will be more engaged and will have a better overall experience.

 

Population Health Vendors: What’s not to like?

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A reader emailed me, “You have a large vocabulary.” “You ought to see the jar where I keep my adverbs,” I replied.  Clearly, I am not an imminent threat to win the Nobel Prize.

Suffering fools can be a synonym for flying. Today the term fit better than OJ Simpson’s glove, and by the time the plane was ready to depart I was ready to initiate a personal jihad.  There was no TSA line at security, so I had to shuffle through the cattle pen along with everyone else. The moving sidewalk between two of the terminals stopped moving at its midpoint.  The group in front of me, who had been riding the walkway as though it was a premium ride at 6-Flags clogged the way forward in much the same way an errant piece of plaque would have clogged an artery.

I learned that my assigned seat would not recline, but the USAIR attendant, who had the posture of a dislodged sock monkey and the look of someone who had forgotten to buy the radicchio at the supermarket, offered to sell me a reclining seat for only ninety dollars.  She smiled at me the way a fish smiles when it has been on ice all day. I sighed loudly and she said, “I’m not sure I like your attitude.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m not selling it.”

I could hardly wait until we disembarked, eagerly anticipating that moment when the other passengers tried to rub two brain cells together to see if they could remember how to unlock their seatbelts, pull their luggage from the overhead compartments, and make their way to the front of the plane. I feel like I should award style points to anyone who manages to do two of the three tasks correctly.  Sometimes it seems it would be easier to teach sign language to a yak.

So, where were we?  Population Health and Population Health Applications Vendors.  Necessary and insufficient.

A word of advice. There is not a lot to be gained by losing sleep over which Population Health application to purchase.  That is not because the applications are all equal. It is because most hospitals will not get real value from their purchase. But before the vendors get all worked up over my remark, my perception of the lack of value of their product has little to do with their application.

May I try to explain?

Let’s assume a certain software vendor had written an application to predict how a baseball player would perform.  And let’s assume that a baseball team used the software.  The team tracked the performance of player A on the first game of the season, it tracked the performance of player B on game 57 and game 83. And it tracked the performance of player C on game 159.

For those who do not follow baseball, here are a few reference points.  Each team has twenty-five players, and each team plays 162 games each year.  Raise your hand if you see where this is headed.

One player makes up four percent of the team’s population.  One game represents .006% of the total number of games played in a year. A team that only has information about three of its players has no information about eighty-eight percent of its player population. Can a team that is missing information about eighty-eight percent of its population make smart and effective decisions to improve the performance of the entire team?

Can a team that only has information on three players, and is missing the information on those three players on 160-161 of the 162 games draw any meaningful conclusions about how those players will perform over the course of the season?  Can the team draw any inference from that limited data about how the performance of those players will impact the players for which they have no information?

Of course not.  Software without inclusive data that is representative of the population is worthless.

Now let’s make the following jump in logic.

Substitute Hospital for team, service population for 25 players, patients treated for the 3 players (A, B, C), and the days of collected health information for .006-.012% of the days for which data was collected on the three ballplayers.

Can a hospital who has no data on the health of so many of its stakeholders—former patients, discharged patients, and prospective patients (Consumers) draw any real inference about the health of the entire population whose health it is managing?

Can a hospital who only has data about the health of a patient for the days on which the patient was in the hospital draw any real inference about the health of that individual when it has no data for the other ninety-eight percent of the days in the year?

Of course not. Does having the best population health management application change that answer?  Of course not.  The value of every population health management application is only as good as the amount of data it has.  That application cannot make meaningful forecasts with an amount of data that is statistically insignificant.

For the application to be of any value, the hospital must have data from more of the population.  For the application to be of any value the hospital must have data on each person that includes the health of that individual over the course of the year.

The fly in the ointment is that using the current method the hospital only collects data on an individual when the individual is in the hospital. To get the data the hospital needs to effectively manage the health of the individual and the health of the population the hospital has two choices. It can either make every person come to the hospital every day, or it can create a way for all of the people to send their data to the hospital every day.

For population health management to be effective providers must find a way to make the collection and analysis of health and wellness data interactive.

What do you think?

Patient Experience: What Patients Hate The Most

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The world record for the high jump remained unbroken for years.  Do you know what had to happen to break it?  Somebody decided to try jumping backwards…Today we are going to look at how healthcare can jump backwards, not it time, but doing something totally different and far from its comfort zone.

My wife and I had finished having dinner at a nice restaurant and we were waiting for our check.  The waitress brought it.  I looked at the amount and it was only twenty percent of what I had expected. A moment later the wine steward appeared and laid a slip of paper on our table—forty-five dollars.  In turn came the busboy, the sous-chef, the maître d, the dishwasher, the pastry chef, and the head chef.  All told we received eight separate bills for our meal, and no single bill showed the total amount.

To say the least it made for a confusing experience.

When we bought our house, our bill—the settlement statement—showed what we owed down to the penny.  We did not get separate invoices for the plumbing, the windows, the fireplace and the roof.  We also did not get an invoice so detailed that it itemized every nail and every tube of caulk.  Somehow those costs were folded in to other costs.  Do you know how they avoided the problem of multiple bills, paid to multiple contractors with multiple terms?  The builder acted as the general contractor.

It made for a much better experience than if we had been invoiced separately.

Since we all know where this is heading, I’ll head there quickly.

Healthcare:

  • There is no organization acting as the general contractor
  • Multiple invoices from multiple vendors
  • Different payment terms by vendor
  • Different coverage by payer
  • Excruciating line item detail—itemizing Tylenol
  • Nothing showing what is covered and what is owed and why
  • More complexity than a detailed IRS tax return
  • Patients do not know what they owe and to whom they owe it
  • Patients do not know what is covered and why other things are not covered
  • Patients do not know what anything cost ahead of time
  • Hospitals do not know their costs—they only know what they charge
  • Two people having the same procedure at the same hospital will not be invoiced the same amount

The entire hospital billing process makes for an awful patient experience.  Healthcare is the only service someone can purchase without having any idea what they owe and why.  If the amount is large enough it remains an awful experience for months and years until the amount is paid.

I’m guessing, but I would be willing to bet that not one person in fifty in a hospital could accurately explain a patient’s total charges.

The entire billing process could be reimagined, it could be reinvented.  And the reinvention could include a single bill.  For those screaming at their PCs that it cannot be done, the only reason it cannot be done is that it has not been done, and that is not a reason.

Patient experience has to do with dozens of things that are very important to patients, things that hospitals have not changed in decades.

To be the hospital of choice you have to be the hospital people choose, and people will choose the hospital that is the easiest to do business with.

The Ten Commandments of Patient Experience

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According to social media mavens, people are a lot more likely to read your blog if the title includes phrases like the five best, the six most, and seven things you should never do.

Hence, the ten commandments of patient experience.

When I began commenting about improving patient experience I drew comparisons of a hospital’s business processes to those in the hospitality industry, and I was liberal with my use of the word customer instead of patient.  Readers used to throw metaphorical tomatoes at their monitors.  Over time that angst subsided, was replaced by indifference, and most readers began to accept the notion that having a heretic in their midst was the new steady-state.

Few have accepted the notion that most hospitals ought to at least augment their patient experience focus to include what happens outside of the hospital—prior to admissions and after discharge, and fewer still are paying any attention to the largest group of stakeholders—non-patients.

After all, patient experience for non-patients is a non sequitur.  Or is it?  Most people who are discharged change their status; they change from patient to prospective patient.  For them to become a patient again, to be treated for something new or to undergo a new procedure, the hospital must acquire them. 

The unique thing about prospective patients is that all of them reside outside of the hospital.  If your patient experience focus is entirely within the hospital you have no idea what experiences those people have and whether or not those experiences are even satisfactory, a poor benchmark by anyone’s standards.

What are those unmeasured and unreported experiences?  They include access in all of its forms.  Scheduling, admissions, second opinions, billing, complaints, labs, and discharge.  They happen online and on the phone. 

And, if they do not happen well, they will not happen again.  Those people, whose experiences of trying to do business with the hospital are poor, will go somewhere else.  Those people, the hospital’s assets with a lifetime value of between $180,000 to $250,000, will move that asset to another hospital.  They are the same people who cost less to acquire as patients than do the ones who are not even looking at your hospital’s website or calling the switchboard.

Anyway, back to the commandments.  There is only one—

A remarkable experience for every person every time on any device.

How Can Reinventing Patient Experience Decrease Readmissions?

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As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.

Then I read an article espousing the ROI of EHR.  I leave it to you to decide if these two activities are one in the same.

I also read an article on reducing readmissions in this month’s HealthLeaders, Readmissions: The Big Picture.  Perhaps it is because my synapses do not work the way they were intended to work, but the first thing that came to mind for me was How could Patient Experience be reinvented to help contribute to the goal of reducing readmissions?  Could deliberately coloring outside of the lines help to solve a real problem?

It absolutely can.  One reason patients readmit is because of their failure to comply with their discharge instructions.  They do not do what they are supposed to do, they do not do it with the frequency with which they are supposed to do it, or they do not understand what to do, who to contact, how to contact them or when when something goes akimbo.  And worst of all, nobody at the hospital knows anything about these failures until the patient is readmitted.

Many of us have been discharged.  I remember the discharge process as the only thing standing between me and the front door.  I would have nodded to anyone and signed anything to be home and to have the hospitalization behind me.  I would read the fine print once I was paroled, once I had a real television remote in my hand, not some off-white three-channel device that was tethered to the hospital bed.  Is it possible that more than a handful of patients feel this way?

Since you cannot give patients a test to confirm they understand their instructions prior to discharging them, and you have no control of patients once they leave, is the situation hopeless?

Patient experience continues once patients are discharged.  Or it could.  Post discharge, most patient experiences—and family experiences—consist of calling the hospital for a variety of reasons; understanding discharge instructions, scheduling a follow-up appointment, scheduling a lab, understanding a bill, filing a claim—reasons very similar to those encountered by patients before they are admitted.  Unfortunately, the people being called may not know the right answer to any of these questions.  Unfortunately, the line may be busy; it may be after hours, or during the lunch break.  Access 8 a.m. until 6 p.m.

They call the hospital.  How well did that work?  If the answer is not well, they may be on their way to having a very poor experience.  If it concerns their discharge instructions they may be on their way to being readmitted.

Here’s how we can tie reducing readmissions to patient experience.  It is not complex, it does not require and MD or a PhD, and it is not really all that innovative unless innovation means looking at solving the problem in a way that differs from the way solving problems is normally looked at.

It is all about access, two-way access.  Two-way access between the hospital and the patient.  Digital and mobile access.  Twenty-four by seven.  I know you do not do it this way, and the natural reaction to this idea is that some of you will have a long list of reasons why this cannot be done or why it will never work at your hospital.  It won’t work for people who do not want it to work, or who may not have the skills. One invalid excuse for it not working is not because it cannot be done.  It can, someone just has to tell someone to make it happen.

Let us take a non-natural reaction, just for a minute.  I envision the following—this is not exhaustive, it does not come from hours of research.  It is just a back-of-the-napkin idea that I would like your opinion as to whether it is worth another napkin or two.

What if the complete discharge summary, and everything patients needed to do, could be available to the patient and the primary care provider in real-time, at the time of discharge?  What if the patient’s behavior and compliance could be recorded, tracked, and reported?  Online access.  Perhaps on an iPad type of device.  Let’s use me as an example, me, the guy who was in too big of a hurry to get discharged to pay attention to my instructions.

Now that I am home I read the instructions.  I register on the website using some form of secure ID that pulls up what I need.  I read about my medications—what they are for, when I have to take them, possible side effects.  I discover that I can track my recovery progress on the site, enter when I take my meds, record when I may have exercised or gone to therapy, perhaps enter what I ate, my blood pressure, and weight. 

Maybe my wife logs in and helps me schedule an appointment, therapy, or a lab. If I schedule a lab the site tells me my instructions prior to having the lab work done, and I provide an electronic signature to confirm my understanding of those instructions.

If I have questions I use the online chat function, or I submit a question that will be replied to within an hour.

My primary care provider can access my progress.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of tasks, and it deserves more consideration than the twenty minutes it took to write this post.  However, if you pair the idea of decreasing admissions and increasing access, and do so using user-centered design to create an intuitive user experience you may be surprised by the results.

What Does Remarkable Patient Experience Look Like?

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My mother would tell me, if a good idea goes in one ear and out of the other there must not be anything in its path to block it.

Procrustes—nicknamed the stretcher and the subduer—was an hotelier, well sort of.  Procrustes’ problem was his bed, his iron bed.  He told his invited guests that he only had one bed, and like Goldilocks, it turns out that his bed was always either too short or too long.  I should let you know that Procrustes’ actually had two sizes of bed.  That way he could ensure himself that his bed would never fit his guests.

He was not a very good host as his tendency towards sadism demonstrated.  Once a person agreed to spend the night Procrustes’ task was to make sure his guests fit the bed.  Those guests who were too tall were shortened; the shorter ones were stretched.

Something defined as Procrustean produces strict conformity by ruthless or arbitrary means.

Iron beds. HCAHPs.  Strict conformity by ruthless—CMS penalties—or arbitrary means—thirty-two questions that do not begin to cover the breadth of a person’s experiences with a health system.  Approaching it this way may make it seem everything is in harmony, and hospitals know they are all being held hostage to the same standards, no matter how wanting or abridged those standards may be.

For those who enjoy movies, one of my favorite lines comes from The City Slickers—we don’t know where we’re going but we’re making really good time.  Aren’t we though.

What if CMS added a 33rd question to HCAHPs?  The question asked of the patients—“What percentage of the time were all of the lights in your room working?” Indeed.  Here’s what I think would happen.  Press Ganey would sell you your data telling you just how many lights were not working.  The Studer Group would offer coaching services about fixing the lights, and your hospital would form a committee to figure out how to raise your scores.

When it is spelled out like this it is easier to see the fallacy of confining yourselves to the responses of thirty-two survey questions as the sole determinant of how people perceive your hospital. Why not use twenty-nine? Why not one hundred and eight?  Is every hospital identical?  Can all of the important experiences be so nicely bundled and wrapped with a bow?

Of course they cannot.

Think about access.  Patient access.  Family access.  Physician access.  HCAHPs do not address access.  Is that because access has no bearing on the experience and satisfaction of patients and prospective patients?  If access has a bearing, one might argue it has even a greater bearing than lights that always work, bathrooms that are always clean, noiseless hallways, and smiling staff.  If people cannot access the hospital using the time and means of their choosing then it is not easy for them to do business with it.

Access should be scored as follows—A remarkable experience for every person every time on every device.  Remarkable is easy to score.  The score is binary, it was or it wasn’t.  you do not put an initiative in place to take your remarkableness from a score of 7.23 to 7.33.  you put an initiative in place to take it to remarkable.

Where does your hospital score on access with regard to being remarkable?  What is your hospital doing to improve it?

Are Hospitals Looking in the Wrong Haystack for the Needles?

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“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”

Gibberish (I thought Jibberish was spelled with a J) is good, and often insightful.

Sometimes I have to rack my brain to decide what to write; other times it is handed to me, just begging for a response.  This is one of the “other” times.

In the fable of “Chicken Little” the chicken believes the sky is falling because an acorn fell on its head—the chicken was wrong.  In the fable “The boy who cried wolf” the people in the village are fooled into believing a wolf is attacking their village.  The people are wrong.

In the CMS fable “Everything a hospital ever needed to concern itself with regarding patient experience,” CMS is wrong.  And to make matters worse, CMS has all of the providers focusing all of their efforts on catching the wolf.  What many do not recognize is that providers would have been doing these things with or without the hard hand of CMS.

It is much more difficult to find the needle in the haystack when you are not on the same road as the haystack.  Hospitals have already found many of the needles.  Their problem is that the remaining needles are smaller and smaller, and more difficult to find.  Thus, finding each subsequent needle costs more.  Hospitals have also missed the fact that right next to the CMS haystack are other haystacks with needles the size of javelins waiting to be found.

Case in point.  Another one of the articles in HealthLeaders’ August issue, “Patient Experience and Cultural Transformation.”  To be fair, the article is perfectly fine and is likely spot-on in its representation of the survey responses it received.  Regular readers of this blog will recall that I also took umbrage with another article in this issue in my post “My review of HealthLeaders’ lead article “New Approaches to Patient Experience.” Where’s the “New”? ow.ly/obdPp.

HealthLeaders is reporting the facts, just like when Sergeant Joe Friday in Dragnet requested “Just the facts ma’am.”

Sometimes the facts do not tell the story.  Sometimes somebody needs to question the validity of the facts. Sometimes somebody needs to ask “What are the implications of those facts?”  somebody needed to have asked those surveyed “Why?”  This is one of those “sometimes.”

The article presented the results of a survey sent to the HealthLeaders Media Council and select members of its audience. Two hundred and ninety-nine completed surveys were received with a “margin of error of +/-5.7% at the 95% confidence interval.”

In the opinion of this writer, the data in ‘quotes’, while likely 100% accurate from the perspective of statistical sampling—meaning they analyzed the responses correctly, is probably 100% inaccurate from the standpoint of the what they should be doing.  At best, what providers are doing passes the test of being necessary, but it does not pass the test of being both necessary and sufficient.  It reflects the reality of what provider executives perceive they need to do to improve patient experience. It is also worth noting that even though the responses in the article were segmented between providers and health systems, patients and prospective patients make no such differentiation when it comes to their experience.

In the sciences, when one gets a result that does not jive with one’s hypothesis it is often helpful to reinterpret the result by multiplying by negative one or by evaluating the inverse of the result.  For purposes of this blog, we are going to do both.

The article reports what its respondents plan to do regarding addressing patient experience.  I originally thought about using the word ‘improving’ instead of ‘addressing’ but I chose ‘addressing’ because I am not convinced that these efforts, if enacted, will improve anyone’s experience.

As an example, what if two customer experience surveys were compared side-by-side.  One for hospitals and one for hotels.  Might they look like this?

HOSPITAL

    

HOTEL

  

What is the NO. 1 goal of your patient experience efforts?

  

What is the NO 1. goal of your customer experience efforts?
         

Improved HCAHPs Scores

36%

  

retaining customers

99%

Improved clinical outcomes

33%

  

getting referrals from customers

99%

Improved market share

9%

  

improved market share

99%

improved word of mouth

7%

  

improved revenue generation

99%

improved revenue generation

4%

      

improved reimbursement

2%

      

other

8%

      

No one is arguing that for hospitals to be successful at patient experience that they need to think of themselves as hotels.  No one is arguing that hospitals should stop trying to manage pain or to reduce noise.  The argument is that there are plenty of other things hospitals could be doing to compliment their current initiatives, things which would have a much greater impact on improving experience.

What is the business problem hospitals are trying to solve as they wrestle with what to do about patient experience?  Are hospitals endeavoring by their efforts to create a remarkable experience for every person every time?  If they were their approach would be entirely different.  Are they trying to retain patients, to earn referrals, to capture a higher percentage of their receivables?  If they were their approach would be entirely different. 

The problem hospitals are trying to solve is to avoid the CMS penalty.  Hospitals’ expenditures of people and capital are not targeted to solve an actual business problem; the expenditures are to avoid a problem created for them.

The HealthLeaders survey asked, and the article reported answers to the following questions:

  • What is the number one goal of your patient experience efforts?
  • In which of the following patient-related areas do you expect your organization to focus over the next three years for patient experience improvements?
  • Please rank your motivations for investing time or resources to improve patient experience scores
  • Who has the primary responsibility for patient experience in your organization?

Permit me to comment on these in the order in which they were presented in the article.

  • The number one goal reported by hospital executives is ‘improved’ HCAHP scores. So, let us assume the hospital achieved its goal and rocketed to the first quartile, thus removing itself from CMS’ penalty.  What do they get from that achievement? Retention, referrals? Nope?

Is this goal not an example of keeping ones focus on the hole versus the doughnut?  None of the responses listed any mention of the word ‘patient.’ Less than one in ten respondents addressed improving market share, not that the planned efforts will do much to improve share. And, none of the responses mentioned making any effort to retain patients or to attract prospective patients. 

According to the survey results, hospitals’ primary focus are on trying to meet an artificial benchmark created by CMS without knowing whether achieving this benchmark is the best thing they could be doing to create a remarkable experience for every person every time. 

What if CMS had decided that those hospitals that had the most number of physicians shorter than six feet tall would be penalized?  Would hospitals fire the height-challenged doctors?  Clearly this is absurd. Or is the analogy comparable? 

  • I am stupefied, but being stupefied has become my comfort zone.  Hospitals are going to focus their efforts exactly where they have been focusing their efforts.  If hospitals all do the same things, and they each improve by a factor of ‘X’, then has anything changed?  Forty percent are going to focus on noise reduction—earplugs—ten cents.  Twenty-five percent on housekeeping—Motel Six can give pointers and they will ‘leave the lights on.’  Better signage?  Please. 

Improving patient experience is an issue that has the attention of most hospitals.  Yet the solutions being proposed seem to be sorely lacking the following initiatives:

  1. Innovation
  2. Transformation
  3. Patient retention
  4. Patient referrals

 

  • Motivation for the effort and expenditure.  If everyone’s motivation is relatively identical, what is the likelihood that the results will be relatively identical—that is, unchanged?  At some point in time won’t the height of every hospital’s physicians be six feet or taller?

 

  • Who is responsible for patient experience?  In three percent of the hospitals the chief experience officer is responsible for the experience of the patients.  Am I missing something here?  Does that mean only three percent of hospitals have this position, or is the position merely rhetorical?  Would the cafeteria manager have scored as high or higher.

Who is responsible for the experiences of the prospective patients? Apparently nobody.  Who is responsible for the experiences of people before they come to the hospital, after they are discharged, and of those wondering if they should seek a second opinion from another hospital?  If hospitals cannot agree as to who is responsible for their current assets (patients), then we can be certain that nobody is responsible for the experience or satisfaction of prospective patients (their future assets) or for those patients seeking a second opinion.

Glaringly absent from the response categories for this survey question are the roles of chief marketing officer, sales, and business development.  If that is a true reflection of the answer to the question of who has the responsibility, then what exactly is the responsibility of those organizations?

The tallied survey responses seem to be all about raising HCAHP scores and avoiding penalties; not about improving the experience or patients and prospective patients.  Does that seem to be the case in your organization?

I have corroborated my analysis estimating that the lifetime value of a patient is somewhere between $180,000-$250,000.  That means that a prospective patient is worth the same amount.  Add to that the revenues of a patient’s family and friends and all of a sudden we are looking at numbers that demand innovation and transformation around patient experience.

Patient Equity Management. Family Equity Management.

A remarkable experience for every person every time on any device.  If this is your goal, the value of having your primary focus be reducing noise, housekeeping, and signage needs to be rethunk.

Patient Experience with a JD Power Twist

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Everyone knows the elephant in the room.  Unfortunately the elephant does not know any of them.

I read Toyota’s US president has decided to change Toyota’s business strategy as a result of the latest JD Power rankings.  Even though Toyota regained the world-wide leadership in car sales on July 30, 2013, it did not have a single car listed in JD Power’s initial quality results across all body styles.

“Perhaps all of the other automobile manufacturers have discovered automotive’s secret sauce.  We sell more cars than anyone else, but what good is that if we do not meet Power’s criteria.  Sure our customers swear by us, but what do they know about cars?” Asked James Edsel. “They just want something that looks cool, has great speakers, and a USB connection.”

James continued by explaining, “We have decided to follow the strategy of the US healthcare industry.  Health systems thought they were doing pretty well with their understanding of their patients’ experiences until CMS came along with its HCAHPs ratings and told them how to really measure the entirety of patient experience.  Now hospitals can see what a tiny fraction of their patients actually thought of their care months back when they received it.  They can pay money for their own data, and hire people to make their numbers look better the next time they pay for their data.”

“After all, why rely on what all of your customers and prospective customers tell you when you can simply go to one source and have them tell us what they think we need to hear.  One report and someone else does all the work.”

I’ll leave it to you to decide if there is a workable analogy there. To be fair, I heard the analogy while speaking with someone yesterday who is way smarted than me.

JD Powers is a business.  It conducts market research based on customer surveys. It then sells the research to the automobile manufacturers.  The big difference is the automobile manufacturers are not forced to alter their business model to raise their scores.

 

Improving Patient Experience: Why not try something new?

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Success and failure are often separated by the slimmest of margins. Sometimes success hinges on how you present your idea. It is possible to force the circumstances via rapid evolution to pass from problem, to possible solution, to believable, to heroic? I believe so.

Permit me to illustrate with frozen chicken. Several hours before dinner I threw the frozen chicken breasts into the sink, choosing to thaw them with water instead of the microwave. Some twenty minutes later while checking emails I wondered what we were having for dinner. Not to be outdone by own inadequacies, I remembered we were having chicken. I remembered that we were having chicken because I remembered turning on the hot water. The only thing I couldn’t remember was turning off the hot water.

I raced to the kitchen. My memory of having forgotten to turn off the water was correct. Grabbing every towel I could find, I soaked up the man-made lake that had appeared on the hardwood flooring.  While draining the lake I thought about how I might answer to my wife if she happened to return to a kitchen during high tide. My first reaction, admittedly poor, was to tell her that I thought the countertop wasn’t level and that the only way to know for sure was to see which direction the water ran. Telling her the truth never entered my mind.

Once the major puddles had been removed, I worked on version two of the story, quickly arriving at a version of the truth that seemed more palatable—tell her I decided to wash all the towels. Why not get bonus points instead of getting in trouble? Version three looked even better. Since I was wiping the floor with the towels, instead of telling her I washed the towels, why not double the bonus points? I decided to wash the floor, and wash the towels. Husband of the year couldn’t be far off.

A few hours have passed. The floor is dry—and clean, the towels are neatly folded and back in the linen closet, and the chicken is on the grill. All the bases covered. A difficult and embarrassing situation turned into a positive by quick thinking.

A few of you have asked, let’s say we buy into what you are saying, how do you propose we create a remarkable patient experience? All kidding aside, it comes down to presentation. Clearly you can’t walk into a room with a bunch of slides showing that with all of your hospital’s efforts you have only managed to improve the experience of the patients from 7.25 to 7.27.  

The first requirement to turn stalled patient experience scores into a remarkable experience for every patient and every prospective patient every time is to quit focusing only on HCAHPs.  Think of it as a patient experience 12-step meeting; “Hi, my name is Paul, and my patient experience scores have flat-lined.”  See, that was not so difficult. 

And what needs to be done?  Why not take a deep breath and decide that the time has come to lead and innovate, and to stop relying on CMS to define what patient experience means for your hospital?

Here is a start for those looking for the first step.

Define the Total Quality of a person’s Experience (TQE). I use person instead of patient because prospective patients also have experiences when they visit family members, when they call the hospital and are on the web trying to decide where to buy healthcare.

TQE = Patient Experience (think HCAHPs) + Persons’ Satisfaction (all other touchpoints)

So, how did my chicken dinner turn out? I was feeling confident that I had sidestepped to worst of it. Overconfident, as it turned out. My son hollered from the basement, “Dad, why is all this water down here?”

 

Patient Experience: So what exactly do I do for hospitals?

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A number of you have written recently asking what it is I do and how I might be able to assist their organization.

I have consulted on innovating patient/customer experience for twenty-five years, having run my own consulting firm for the last seventeen. My clients on five continents have a combined customer base of more than two hundred million.

Less than twenty percent of health systems have a working definition of patient experience, and of those that do it is defined around HCAHPs. My definition is a remarkable experience for every person (patient and prospective patients) every time on every device.  Major parts of what hospitals lack are a strategy to provide that kind of experience to both patients and prospective patients.  This includes linking a mobile experience strategy and a digital strategy.  Setting this as a goal enables hospitals to focus on improving not just the care, but also on improving patient retention, patient referrals, attracting new patients, and making it easier to do business with the hospital.

In healthcare almost every hospital regards patient experience solely as defined by CMS. That ignores the experiences and level of satisfaction of those not surveyed, people seeking second opinions, and prospective patients. It ignores the experiences occurring prior to admissions, and those occurring post-discharge. It also does not address experiences formed from nonclinical processes like scheduling, admissions, billing, claims, and complaints.

More people ‘visit’ the hospital each day by phone and on the web than walk in the front door, yet nobody knows how those people rate their experience and whether they will ever return.

Eighty percent of prospective patient’s visit a hospital’s website before determining where they will buy healthcare.  Fifty percent of patients go to a hospital’s website to determine whether they will seek a second opinion. Nobody who designed the website ever asked one of those patients what information they would need to find to help them select their hospital. 

I help organizations answer these questions.

I start by helping them define a strategy for what I call the Total Quality of a person’s (patient and prospective patient) Encounter (TQE) with the hospital.  Next I complete an assessment of where they are with regard to meeting the TQE strategy including developing:

  • A digital strategy including:
    • Websites—most hospitals have hundreds of disparate URLs
    • Social media and social CRM
  • A mobile strategy for meeting their needs on various devices
    • For example, why can’t a patient schedule an appointment online or do some form of self-admitting on an iPad rather than arriving at six AM with everyone else?
  • A Call Center Strategy
  • A strategy for improving Nonclinical business processes 

Based on the assessment we jointly set priorities and a work plan to create a remarkable experience for everyone.

Attached are a few brief presentations that offer some detail.  Please let me know if we may schedule a call or perhaps meet.

http://www.slideshare.net/paulroemer/defining-a-global-patient-experience-for-your-health-system

http://www.slideshare.net/paulroemer/step-aside-hcahps

http://www.slideshare.net/paulroemer/call-center-strategies

You can reach me at paulroemer@gmail.com, or by phone 484-885-6942.

http://www.slideshare.net/paulroemer/how-to-acquire-patients-21677042