The Ten Pillars of Patient Satisfaction
and the Quality Patient Experience - Leadership Vision and Commitment: Leaders at all levels need to advance a strong vision of the quality patient experience and back this up with focus, financial investment and accountability.
- Process Design and Continuous Improvement: To provide reliable, consistent care and service to patients and families, care and service processes need to be designed based on best practices and customer requirements. Then, after installation and fine-tuning, these processes need to be monitored and sustained so that they produce predictable results.
- Employee Engagement and Empowerment: The people who comprise the organization need to mobilize to take the action and initiative to influence the nature and quality of the patient experience. They after all, are front and center in relationships with patients and families.
- Accountability: To provide an exceptional patient experience, the organization needs to establish high (and ever higher) standards for patient care and service and push those standards from rhetoric to reality by persistent focus, performance coaching, and consequences and courageous decisions. Standards with teeth supported by explicit requirements spelled out in job descriptions, performance evaluations and more.
- Measurement and Feedback: Key to accountability and a powerful driver of excellence on its own, measurement and feedback methods need to be sound and produce information that leaders communicate and use to drive celebration and improvement.
- Communication, Communication, Communication: The organization’s communication vehicles and every staff member’s personal communication performance need to align with and advance the patient-centered culture with primacy on consistently positive outcomes consistently high patient satisfaction.
- Staff Development and Training: Since people are so pivotal in the patient experience, leaders need to invest in developing their greatest strength—their people. All training strategies, whether focusing on patient safety, medical record-keeping or financial management need to connect with the ultimate focus on the well-being of patients and families.
- Reward and Recognition: Every organization provides incentives. The question is: What do the incentives encourage? The patient-centered, service-oriented hospital culture needs to include recognition practices that attach positive consequences (pay, pats on the back, advancement, perks, celebrations, and the like) to patient-centered decisions, compassionate care and service.
- Service Recovery: The organization needs to install and sustain a thoughtfully planned service system for inviting and handling complaints and providing remedies or remediation. Also, every member of the health care team needs to be ready and able to nip complaints in the bud without going through hoops and do all they can to turn dissatisfaction into satisfaction.
- Relentless Focus and Sustainability: This is the really hard part—keeping your patient focus on the front burner, addressing patient experience and patient satisfaction issues in every meeting and in every plan, allocating resources to enhancing the patient experience -- chasing after your vision with stubborn determination
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