All Posts Tagged With: "patient satisfaction"
A Patient First Culture
It’s likely that every medical center claims to put patients first. Those that actually put patients first can back up their claims with tangible results.
Schneck Medical Center, a 2011 Baldrige Award winner, is a 93-bed nonprofit hospital in southern Indiana. “At the forefront of Schneck’s commitment to excellence,” it states on its website, “is the Patient First Culture.” That culture has enabled Schneck to score 100% on 17 of 22 core measures reported for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Its patient satisfaction scores meet or exceed the top 10% or top 25% levels on nine of ten Press Ganey measures. Its hospital-acquired infection rate has been at or below 1% since 2008. It ranks second among 94 hospitals in its geographic region in value-based purchasing, which holds healthcare providers accountable for the quality and cost of their services.
An organization’s culture shapes its decisions. Schneck had limited treatment options for patients suffering myocardial infarctions, taking 120 minutes from the time a heart attack was diagnosed to the first intervention. To put these patients first, it collaborated with its largest competitor, located 25 miles away, to coordinate handing off patients who needed emergency cardiac catheterizations. The initiative has reduced…
5Dec2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA Healthcare Innovator
The Henry Ford Health System built its first new hospital since 1915 a couple years ago in West Bloomfield, 30 minutes from downtown Detroit. According to William C. Taylor, the hospital “truly must be seen to be believed.” (“One Hospital’s Radical Prescription for Change,” HBR, June 2, 2010)
Here are a few things that made Taylor a believer:
- The hospital sits on a wooded 160-acre campus
- All 300 rooms are private and designed so that family members can stay overnight if they wish
- All patients go right to pre-assigned rooms when they arrive
- A concierge helps patients and families with errands
- A “tea sommelier” recommends different teas for different situations
- There’s a day spa and an indoor farmer’s market every Wednesday
- There’s a 90-seat demonstration kitchen to teach patients’ families and the community how to prepare better food
- A celebrity chef spent two years creating 3,000 healthy recipes for patients to choose from
- The atrium features more than 2,000 trees lining paths to shops that sell products that can improve health
There’s a Baldrige connection to this story: West Bloomfield’s new CEO is Gerard van Grinsven, who joined Henry Ford after a long career with two-time Baldrige Award winner Ritz-Carlton. Skeptics questioned the wisdom of hiring someone with no healthcare experience to…
3Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Saves Lives
According to Rulon Stacey, president and CEO of Poudre Valley Health System, there are people alive today because of what PVHS has done with Baldrige. PHVS, which won the Baldrige Award in 2008, will receive the Award from President Obama in a ceremony on December 2.
Located in northern Colorado, PVHS has 4,300 employees, 600 physicians, and 900 volunteers. It started integrating Baldrige in 1999. “It was a big time of change for Poudre Valley Health System,” said Pam Brock, vice president of marketing. “We’d gone through five CEOs in four years and we had a 25% turnover rate. The organization was struggling and this was when Rulon first became CEO. He knew we needed something to take the organization to a different place.” (“PVHS goes to Washington—finally,” Steve Porter, Northern Colorado Business Report, November 20, 2009)
Its results point to a very different place. Modern Healthcare magazine named it one of “America’s 100 Best Places to Work in Healthcare” in 2008. Poudre Valley Hospital was recognized as the nation’s number one hospital for sustained nursing excellence in 2007 and 2008. For five consecutive years, Poudre Valley Hospital has been one of seven U.S. hospitals named a Thomson 100 Top Hospital for superior outcomes,…
23Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued10 Critical Questions: Results
The Baldrige model focuses on results: You don’t transform an organization without a very good reason, and for those organizations that transform themselves through Baldrige, the reason is because it delivers results. Check out some of the results achieved by Baldrige Award recipients in the following areas:
Better yet, read Category 7 in the award application summary of any winner you choose (click here) and you will find impressive results across all six of the areas measured.
The Results Category is the only Category in the Baldrige Criteria that examines your organization’s performance and improvement—but this one Category is worth 45% of the possible points when scoring a Baldrige application because the Baldrige model focuses on results. The best way to evaluate your results is through an assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your results, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:
What are your current levels and trends in key measures of:
- Product performance OR student learning and improvement in student learning OR health care outcomes, health care process results, patient safety, and patients’ functional status?
- Customer/student/patient and stakeholder satisfaction,…
Measuring Quality in Healthcare
The quality of healthcare has always been an issue but now it’s front-page news as part of the healthcare reform debate. In the July 2009 Quality Progress, Janusz J. Godyn, M.D., takes issue with institutions that define healthcare quality by how patients and families perceive it. According to Godyn, “third-party payers should reward hospitals for maximizing quality of care, while patients should reward hospitals for quality of service.” Of the two, he states that “there is no doubt that quality of care is more important and should shape the meaning of quality in healthcare.”
He proposes three models to measure quality of care, none of which is a panacea:
- Measurable results of medical outcome
- Compliance with the best evidence-based practice
- Ethics plus knowledge and skills plus equipment minus poor safety practices
Godyn also takes issue with the Baldrige Criteria for healthcare, arguing that the Award “focuses on human perceptions of quality as drivers of actual quality in healthcare.”
He’s wrong. Item 7.1 specifically asks for the results of healthcare outcomes-the quality of care. Item 7.2 asks for results of patient satisfaction-the quality of service. Item 7.1 is worth 100 points, which is the largest total for any Item in the Criteria. Item 7.2 is worth 70…
28Jul2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
