by
Gus Iversen, Editor in Chief | July 30, 2019
From the July 2019 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
MJ: The most common mistake providers make to patient experience is that they think it is about the money you spend to create experience. The facility rivaling the most immaculate hotel or spa counts for nothing if you don’t have the right teammates, with the right culture, and the right accountability in place.
HCB News: To what extent are matters of patient experience specific to a given facility, as opposed to universal rules or philosophies?
CP: Our facility makes patient experience a top priority. We have a great senior leadership team that supports and encourages teammates to help make a patient’s experience the best it can be. The culture at our facility is very different than most hospitals. The culture at Lincoln is to be friendly, courteous and helpful.
We also understand that being a smaller hospital, we have the unique privilege of taking care of our friends, family and neighbors and we take pride in that. Our health system is focused on patient experience and we are seeing improvements in all areas. As our mission statement says, we are here to improve health, elevate hope and advance healing for all.
MJ: My personal viewpoint is that patient experience is more about the actions of those who are taking care of the patient than about the facility design, budgets, or location. The facility specific aspect is culture. Culture is set from the top down. We want to improve health, elevate hope and advance healing -- for all. This vision and mission are bold statements about who we are as an organization. As you can see, it doesn’t apply to only one facility but from the east to the west of the enterprise, we embrace the philosophy of patient first-always and it is our culture.
HCB News: How does a stronger patient experience impact other areas of radiology workflow?
MJ: Part of making the patient experience the best is that we are constantly assessing every process. Everything we do ties back to the patient experience. We utilize lean tools to improve process, workflow, and KPI's on a daily basis. The patient experience drives our yearly strategic planning just as much as financial indicators do. From this aspect, patient experience impacts every other workflow, process, and aspect of what we do, how we do it and most importantly why we do it.
CP: A strong patient experience in radiology is shown throughout the hospital setting and especially from our ED patients. It is not uncommon for radiology teammates to be mentioned by name in our emergency department patient survey comment sections.
