Hospitalist Physicians:
Strategy to Enhance Patient Satisfaction

Hospitalist physicians provide so much hands-on care. And yet, many hospitals report patient dissatisfaction with Hospitalist care and service. Patients often don’t understand what a Hospitalist is and how their service and role contribute to great patient care. This strategy engages your Hospitalist team in a process that enhances communication between Hospitalists and patients, other physicians and caregivers, thereby increasing patient satisfaction with these expert and dedicated physicians.

As a result of this strategy, Hospitalists will be able to:

  • Explain and demystify their role to patients and family members
  • Institute impressive greetings, hand-offs and goodbyes
    • Between Hospitalist and patients
    • Among Hospitalists
    • Between Hospitalists and each patient's admitting or primary care physician
  • Speak the language of caring in everyday and difficult situations
  • Improve communication and seamless care with other caregivers
Step One—Groundwork
  • Understand how the process currently works and what's possible in order to design great introductions and great hand-offs
  • Understand how the communication currently flows among Hospitalists and between Hospitalists and the patient's own physician; identify possibilities for process and communication improvements
The assessment process includes:
  • Phone interviews with Medical Director, director of Hospitalists, a small sampling of Hospitalists, and a sampling of nurse managers who work extensively with Hospitalists
  • Review existing written materials (job descriptions, scheduling information, etc.) to understand the Hospitalist role, how they schedule, when and how they hand off in your hospital
Step Two—First 2-hour session with Hospitalists
  • Share the data
  • Discover the opportunity in having the Hospitalists behave as one unified team
  • Examine opportunities for process and communication improvements
  • Refine, review and create great scripts and process improvements for critical junctures of greetings, hand-offs and goodbyes.
  • Define specific experiments for testing improvements between sessions
Step Three—Second 2-hour session with Hospitalists to assess and refine experiments and process improvements (3-4 weeks after session one)

Step Four—One-on-one shadowing and coaching to give Hospitalists specific feedback on how they are applying the skills and tools

Step Five—Follow-up phone calls and troubleshooting—1/2 day

Jill Golde, Senior Associate, provides Wendy Leebov and Associates’ Hospitalist services. Jill and Wendy developed the service and Jill implemented, expanded and refined it very successfully with Summit Health in Chambersburg, PA. Click here to see Patient Survey Results for the Chambersburg Hospital Hospitalists

Wendy Leebov and her team partner with you to develop a custom strategy to meet your needs, culture, timeframes and strengths. To discuss hospitalist or other services tailored to your unique priorities, call Wendy Leebov directly at 215-413-1969 or contact us.


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