Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1485806
25 PATIENT & CAREGIVER EXPERIENCE Improving healthcare access is really about culture change and trust By Rick Evans, Senior Vice President of Patient Services and Chief Experience Officer of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital I n September, I had the opportunity to speak at the Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco. It was a valuable chance to learn about what organizations are doing across the country to improve the experience for their customers. I shared the journey that NewYork- Presbyterian is on to make our organization more customer- and patient-centric and had the chance to hear what other healthcare organizations are doing. A common theme was that, although customer- centric transformation is built on technology, it is still primarily about people. Even more specifically, it is about changing the way we work to better meet the needs of people – both those we serve as well as our own teams. We've had a very busy and productive year working to improve access at NewYork-Presbyterian. We've revamped the digital experience on our websites and stood up customer relationship management- powered contact centers to meet patients' needs on the first call. We've made it easy for customers to make appointments online and migrated practices with over 1,000 physicians onto our new call center platform. We will double that amount again next year. So far, the results have been very positive — more appointments being made, excellent feedback on our call center experience, and happier providers, practice staff and call center agents. We are thrilled with the progress so far, but much work still lies ahead to meet the needs and expectations of our very digitally-savvy and convenience-driven marketplace. But, as I said above, most of the hardest work of the last year has been about people and culture change. What have we learned? Behind our organization's "front door" — our websites and call centers — are care teams working in practices or other treatment sites in our community. e front doors don't mean anything without available appointments behind them. is means that the entire team — both the websites and call centers at the "front" and the practices at the "back" — need to work together as a team to make the right appointment available to the right patient at the right time. To make it all work, we need to be transparent with one another and build trust between all parties. For providers, this can mean letting go of scheduling functions they previously had total control of. For call center teams, it means using technology in new ways to manage an encounter to a successful conclusion. Quite honestly, our journey has meant a leap of faith for us all — that we can structure ourselves in new ways and get a better result. So far, we are seeing that trust pay off. But, it's still a journey in progress. We've also learned that to be successful, many of the silos in our organization need to come together in new ways. Our effort has required enormous collaboration between our hospital and two medical schools. Although we are separate organizations, we constitute one continuum of care for our patients and our destinies are intimately linked. We also have learned how critical it is that our various teams — IT, finance, human resources, marketing, patient experience, quality and others are in sync for this to work. If we aren't clear on our roles and our collective goals, we will not succeed. Many physicians hesitant to treat patients with disabilities, study finds By Mackenzie Bean T wenty-two physicians offered candid insights on the difficulties of treating patients with disabilities in anonymous focus groups conducted for a study published in Health Affairs. Researchers conducted three video sessions with primary care physicians and specialists from across the U.S., many of whom expressed hesitancy in treating patients with disabilities. Numerous physicians suggested that it was a burden to provide physical or verbal accommodations for patients and that they were inadequately reimbursed for such services. Some said treating patients with disabilities also hindered the flow of their practices. "Seeing patients at a 15-minute clip is absolutely ridiculous. To have someone say, well we're still going to see those patients with mild to moderate disability in those time frames — it's just unreasonable and it's unacceptable to me," one physician said. Because of these concerns, some physicians admitted to using various excuses to deny care to people with disabilities "You cannot refuse them straight. We have to give them an appointment," one physician said, acknowledging that physicians cannot legally discriminate against a patient because of a disability. "You have to come up with a solution that this is a small facility, we are not doing justice to you, it is better you would be taken care of in a special facility." The study findings closely mirror reports of substandard healthcare experiences made by many patients with disabilities, according to study author Tara Lagu, MD, a professor of medicine and medical social science at Evanston, lll.-based Northwestern University. Dr. Lagu told The New York Times that a national requirement for healthcare organizations to collect data on the care and outcomes of people with disabilities could help identify disparities and improve care for this population. n