Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1173622
28 PATIENT EXPERIENCE What Northwell Health's got cooking to create rave patient reviews By Anuja Vaidya S ven Gierlinger serves as senior vice president and chief expe- rience officer at New York City-based Northwell Health. Here, he discusses patient pain points, the disconnect in patient ex- perience and what healthcare can learn from the hospitality industry. Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length. Q: What is the No. 1 challenge facing healthcare chief experience officers? Sven Gierlinger: We have a disconnect between how we measure patient experience and how patients actually view their experience. Typically, the measurement is done in a very episodic way. For ex- ample, an emergency department patient would get an ED survey. If they visit one of our physicians a few weeks later, they'd get a medical practice survey about that visit and how the physician was. If they get admitted to the hospital, they'd get a different hospi- tal-specific survey. It's all in slices, and it's not measuring the overall experience with the institution. Also, we don't have really good tools of getting real-time feedback from patients where we can still do something about it. ere are tools out there, like hourly rounding, etc., and we are using those, but probably the biggest issue is the view across an entire expe- rience. at's especially important for a large integrated health system like ours, where we have all those services that connect the continuum of care. Q: How do you plan to tackle it? SG: We are tackling the issues that are potential pain points for patients, and so we actually have a massive initiative on the way. We are calling it our consumer access redesign project. We find that we get great results, feedback and data from our patients about the actual human transactions. Our patients are very satisfied with the care they are receiving from the doctors. We have very high scores in that category, and also with the nursing care they are provided with in the hospitals. But what's difficult for them is billing, for example, or how to get their medical records — so all the underlying processes, everything that is outside of the hospital room or the exam room. Our job is to make the entire experience, from A-to-Z, effortless. We have to take the friction out, and we have to make it easier for people to navigate our system. ere is a lot of stuff I can't speak about yet because we are in the middle of that project, [but] it's about how we connect technology and create an experience where the digital experience is seamlessly woven in with the physical experience or the human experience. If you think about the airline industry, for example, you don't call anymore to make an airline reservation. You can make that on your phone. e human experiences occur when you board the plane or when you have to call the help desk number or the reservation number for something. But you are weaving in and out of digital and human experiences, and you don't even realize it anymore. And that is the same thing we are building in healthcare. Q: What are some of the untapped opportunities to im- prove patient experience today? SG: On the hospital side, there is still an opportunity to focus on the areas of hospitality and create facilities that are more us- er-friendly and more hospitality-focused. Something that we just launched a massive effort around is improving the food in our hos- pitals. Food in healthcare is seen as a necessary evil. It's something that we have to do. We have to feed patients, so let's do it as cheap as possible and let's not focus on the health and wellness aspect or the quality of food. We have hired a chef who worked at the Plaza Hotel for 14 years, and he is completely redesigning the way we deliver food. I think this is an untapped opportunity because I've spoken about that at conferences and done presentations around it, and it always gets a lot of attention. Q: What are some key goals you hope to accomplish before the end of the year? SG: One of our goals on the inpatient side is to improve the star ratings of our hospitals, which are partially based on patient expe- rience, as well outcomes and safety, but experience is a key part of that. We have strategies around how to improve that and to get all of our facilities to a minimum of four, or, hopefully, to a five-star CMS star rating level. Q: How do you see the role of the chief experience officer evolving in the healthcare field over the next five years? SG: For one, I think every healthcare organization will have some- body responsible for patient experience. Depending on the size of the organization, that may be a shared responsibility [with another role]. ere may be various titles, whether chief experience officer or vice president of patient experience or director of patient experience, but every institution will have a dedicated role for that. ere is a growing understanding that patient experience and quality and safety are linked together. ere may be some trend or overlap in those roles. And the same is true for employee experi- ence. I know some colleagues that have responsibility over patient experience and employee experience because so much of patient experience is based on an engaged workforce. You need an engaged workforce to deliver high-quality, safe care. So those are the three elements that are very connected. n