Patient Experience Explorer

Admitting a patient to inpatient care is a complex process that, unless carefully managed, can lead to long delays in service and a poor patient experience.
Thibodaux Regional Medical Center’s consistent focus on patient satisfaction has earned the 185-bed community hospital, located one hour southwest of New Orleans, the Healthgrades® Outstanding Patient Experience Award™ every year since 1998. Not surprisingly, when Thibodaux leadership recently analyzed the hospital’s inpatient admit process, they did so from their patients’ point of view and determined to cut admission wait times. Using focused process improvement methodologies, areas of waste were uncovered, exposing problems such as redundant data collection, and inconsistent processes, which would require innovative solutions.
Integrating concepts from the Health Catalyst improvement methodology into its own Lean Six Sigma processes, and with the support of professional services from Health Catalyst, Thibodaux deployed a systematic set of solutions to significantly improve the admission process.
Thibodaux’s efforts are driving measurable improvements in the hospital’s inpatient admission process, including:

55 percent reduction in average inpatient admission time
Ranked 99th percentile for patient experience

As consumers pay more for their healthcare they are demanding more transparency. In a telling example, it’s estimated that over 84 percent of patients use online provider reviews to help make care decisions. With increased transparency, hospitals need to develop strategies to address patient satisfaction while finding a way to participate for more fully in the patient satisfaction dialogue and social media communications, including the rating process.
One large hospital has done just that by increasing transparency in the patient review process. A key component is providing physician star ratings by patients on the hospital’s own website, with patient survey data sourced from Health Catalyst’s analytics platform. While this strategy took time and effort to win over physician acceptance, it has paid off considerably by taking patient satisfaction to new heights.
The overall patient satisfaction improvement initiative, of which the physician transparency effort was a key component, has proven to be resoundingly successful in supporting physicians and staff in the difficult work of providing outstanding and compassionate care – and has reaped impressive results including,

Improved patient satisfaction scores from 60 percent to over 90 percent
Successfully implemented a physician mitigation strategy with a 98 percent comment acceptance rate
Intensified focus on the patient experience through data and education

Serving patients with special needs, such as traumatic injury or multiple high acuity co-morbidities, is a costly and complex endeavor. Allina Health’s Transitional Rehabilitation Program (TRP) tackled both of these realities head-on—resulting in cost savings while helping this vulnerable patient population achieve a higher quality of life.
Recognizing the need for high-quality data that could prove the TRP’s value to its patients and community, Allina implemented analytics that enabled it to track and report outcomes and costs, demonstrate value, and generate savings for the health system and the community.
The initiative has reaped wide-ranging results in patient improvements and cost savings including saving health systems and communities $3.2 million over a one-year period, 20 percent greater success than traditional skilled nursing facilities in discharging patients to home and community, 20 percent improvement in impairment in brain injury patients (MPAI-4), and 84 percent improvement in spinal cord independence measure (SCIM).

Patient Satisfaction Explorer has enabled Texas Children’s Hospital to trend key performance indicators for patient satisfaction by service unit. Clinicians, executives, and operational leaders can easily drill down into the granular data to analyze patient satisfaction in more detail, including individual survey responses. Their current results include: improved operational efficiencies with integrated data and analytics – which is helping the healthcare system achieve its system-wide initiative to eliminate the use of vendor portals; increased system-side transparency across 3 campuses, 28 survey units and 145 locations with all levels of the organization having full transparency into how their performance is being measured; full empowerment to discover how to improve their patients’ experience, integrated patient satisfaction data into quality improvement initiatives; reduced custom reporting requests by 15%.

While measuring patient satisfaction has become increasingly important for organizations seeking to improve quality and maximize reimbursement, using patient satisfaction data effectively presents a variety of challenges. Organizations must collect the data, distribute it to multiple audiences and integrate it with data from other sources—efforts that often consume significant time and resources. Automating the patient satisfaction reporting process and creating an analytics foundation enables integration of patient satisfaction data into an organization’s overarching quality and cost improvement initiatives.