COVID-19 has heralded in a new concept of healthcare consumerism focused on patient trust. Patient satisfaction surveying will be key to building that trust.
Patient satisfaction surveying and data analysis will be critical for hospitals moving forward in an industry marked forever by the COVID-19 outbreak, according to a new Press Ganey report sent to PatientEngagementHIT via email.
The onset of the novel coronavirus sparked a national change in how patients interact with healthcare. In March, nationwide stay-at-home orders kept most seeking care for non-emergency issues or elective procedures out of the medical facility, making room and preserving resources for COVID-19 patients and emergency treatment.
As the US reopens more of that non-emergency healthcare access, organizations are contending with a paradigm shift. What can they make of healthcare consumerism in a world changed by a contagious and sometimes fatal virus?
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“This pandemic has tested every aspect of the care delivery system, yet the true mission of health care—to deliver reliably safe, high-quality, patient-centered care—remains the same,” Patrick T. Ryan, chairman and CEO at Press Ganey, said in a statement.
According to Press Ganey, and other leaders across the industry, medical providers need to go back to the basics of patient experience.
For example, back in January, the leading experts on healthcare consumerism presented at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference about smartphone apps that help patients book appointments, ask their doctors questions, or even learn more about the current air quality and how that’s going to affect their health that day.
That understanding of healthcare consumerism is gone, the report contended. Right now, patients just want to know they can get high-quality care that is safe and that telehealth and remote care access is going to meet their clinical needs.
“Amid so much change and uncertainty, the fundamental question health care leaders must answer is how their organizations earn patients’ trust,” the report authors wrote in the executive summary.
In short, what was once prioritizing convenient care access and cutting edge apps or technologies is now putting that fundamental need for safety at the forefront.
“Health care will continue be a human-to-human endeavor, and with the rapid pace of change in the era of coronavirus, patients are seeking assurances from their providers now more than ever,” Ryan stated. “The focus on shiny apps and convenience that started the year has rapidly evolved to the overwhelming need by patients to trust that they can safely seek care. Earning and building that trust requires more than good intentions. It requires an effective and comprehensive data strategy that produces insights that can drive better performance.”
To that end, healthcare organizations must continually gauge patient sentiment and then adjust their patient engagement strategy in order to engender patient trust and drive a positive care experience. This must foremost be driven by patient satisfaction surveying, the report authors said.
Organizations should consider continued patient and provider surveying to understand the culture and sentiment around a healthcare organization. Healthcare is changing rapidly, the report authors pointed out, so continued assessment will be critical for quickly pivoting to successfully meet patient needs.
More specifically, providers need comments from patients, caregivers, and providers, as well as the natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) required to make sense of them. These data analytics tools will help organizations draw out the most important themes and trends in patient sentiment.
Finally, organizations may consider point-of-care, pulse, or real-time patient satisfaction surveying. For patient surveys, point-of-care patient rounding helps organizations address specific issues in real-time. On the provider side, it allows organizational leadership to understand provider needs, resolve them, and ideally create trust among providers and senior leadership.
“For most people, health care is usually a low-frequency, high-stakes interaction,” said Thomas H. Lee, MD, the chief medical officer for Press Ganey. “When people need care, they are intently focused on knowing that the quality is excellent and that it is safe. To achieve these goals, leaders should commit to using a data-driven approach to guide actions, responding to insights derived from feedback, and integrating high reliability operating principles across their organizations.”
This more human-centered approach to healthcare consumerism — one that does not necessarily emphasize flashy apps — is not divorced from telehealth, which has seen a considerable uptick in use since March and is slated for continued use.
In fact, the report authors argued that focusing on the human needs that define high-quality care have become even more important as the medical industry continues to embrace telehealth.
“When new models of care, such as telemedicine for outpatients or COVID-19–specific care units within hospitals, are being widely applied for the first time, no one should expect they will be effectively implemented immediately,” the report authors wrote.
“There will be a learning and improvement process for individual clinicians and organizations for years to come. Initially, these new models were set up in rapid fashion due to the crisis, but over time, patient-centeredness and performance improvement must be the key guiding principles.”
And in order to meet that moment, organizations must continually push patient satisfaction surveying.
In the end, making the overture to understand the patient experience and then making changes in order to improve the experience will be critical to establishing patient trust, which is largely the end goal for most organizations adjusting to the COVID and post-COVID world.
“The work immediately ahead will also have a major and long-lasting impact. The good news is that the same basic approaches that have emerged in recent months are likely to be critical for meeting patient, provider, and organizational needs,” the report authors concluded.
“To this end, leaders should commit to using a data-driven approach to guide actions, responding to insights derived from feedback from patients and caregivers, and integrating resilience into their organization’s goal of pursuing high reliability.”
Source: Patient Engagement Hit