What's Holding Your Organization Back from Patient Satisfaction Success?

<p>hello everyone this is Cole from the American Journal of healthc care strategy this is the CX matters podcast today with Britney Watson Brittany please introduce yourself and your role currently hi everyone my name is Britney Waton I am currently an adviser for press gy welcome to the CX matters podcast a production of the American Journal of healthc care strategy with your host Cole Lions everyone of course watching this uh of course the CX man podcast probably very familiar with press gaining one of the kind of leaders in the customer experience patient experience space you have a lot of experience though you've been from looking at the LinkedIn resume here working in the patient experience area for uh many years looks like about 10 years or so if you you add it all together right I think that's about right it's been a long time it's impressive it's it's really really excellent to see people committed to it and then of course you just recently received your master's degree and it's a unique master's degree and that's kind of where I want to start off with can you tell us a bit about how you came to find this master's degree and what it is because you're only as you told me before the show in the second cohort so that's really impressive yeah so uh I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout out to Ashley elro who I worked with uh when I was at Innova she introduced me to the program so Michigan state university offers the program online it's completely online it's a 20-month accelerated program they are the first University uh in North America to offer it so very exciting I'm part of the second cohort so I believe there's only 24 of us it may not even be that high that have our MS cxm uh so it's really exciting it's offered through their uh broad College of Business so I really happened upon it because of Ashley otherwise uh I'm not sure if I would have known about it especially because when she told me about it the program was so uh much in its infancy um and it has since grown in popularity I believe there's two other cohorts that are going through it now so uh yes very excited to have my Master's um and have gone through the program it was a great experience huge congratulations huge congratulations that's awesome so I have to ask right with all this experience um why not get MBA go into Investment Banking right what what is the reason for staying with patient experience why do you like it and enjoy it oh I would never do investment banking because I do not have the brain for that um no so no I'm sure I'm sure you do um so this program absolutely spoke to me because I've always loved uh experience as a career I didn't even realize that you could have a career in experience but I knew even from being being very Green in my career I mean when I was working in high school in retail that I wanted to deliver exceptional experiences and I think that that stems from being an empathetic person and really caring about how people feel and when you have a negative experience you know that that can make or break your relationship with a brand or a company and so I was really excited that finally there was a program where it spoke to everything that I wanted to do I went through numerous different master's degree programs and I was interested in them but nothing really resonated with me the way that this one did um and everything that I was learning and did learn was either applicable next day or it was something that would be talked about in work at some point and then I could relate that back to something that I had learned or it would come up later in the program so having uh exposure to education that I could immediately apply and was so relevant to the work that I was doing and I do now um is just invaluable so I'm very excited that the program exists um and anyone that's interested in uh entering CX um as an occupation or if you're currently in it I highly recommend checking it out I want to talk about real quick too because you're kind of one of the first people here you know who are this new you know brand of CX where we have the certifications we have the the degree that previously wasn't around like you know like cpxs are getting much more common now um so can you just explain what is the difference between customer service and this CX right that was something we talked about before the the show can you explain that to us yeah so I often get asked what's the difference between patient experience and patient satisfaction right it's just easier for me to think about it in PX terms because that's my burn and butter but even with CX it's an customer service when you're talking about it in a patient experience lens patient satisfaction is asking did it happen essentially and how would you rate how it happened but when you're talking about patient experience or you're talking about customer experience you're asking how did you feel when this happened and that's a huge difference so I could go in and have an okay experience when I have a transaction or I can go into a doctor's office and they could say hello and everything could be Baseline right just like a fine experience but you can make or break someone's emotions basically with the type of experience that you deliver and I'll give an example of this so uh I'm new to North Carolina and I had to established Care at my uh new OBGYN because I suffer with endometriosis and I have to have uh continued treatment for it so I was trying to establish care with a new OBGYN and the weight was considerably long um I wasn't being informed of how much longer it was going to be I had to keep going up to the desk asking how much longer it was going to be finally I had to reschedule because I had already been there for an hour past my appointment time um when I said that I needed to reschedule no one apologized to me um when a nurse came up and finally called my name to take me back I was already in the process of rescheduling and I asked her you know should I even reschedule or how quickly can I be taken to the back and she was like well you should just go ahead and reschedule because there's three other patients in front of you no empathy no apology and when I asked her if it was standard to not apologize to patients during weight times she said hm and walked away so how did that make me feel well I'm in pain I'm there because I need treatment I'm new to the area this was my first experience at this OBGYN office and I left that I left that clinic feeling like I didn't matter and my pain didn't matter and I just felt awful um she made me feel less than in 2 seconds and it broke my heart because I strive in my career to ensure that experiences like this don't happen to patients or don't happen to customers but they do and that is why experience matters now I will not go back to that OBGYN I their brand reputation in my mind is shattered and I won't recommend them to other people so it may seem like when you're talking about these things it's like well this is just one person that had this experience but if I've had this experience other people have had this experience and that's why creating positive experiences is so critical it's critical to your brand reputation and loyalty but it's also critical to the mission and values that I'm sure are undoubtedly written on that that Clinic's website like I'm sure that they have this whole blurb about how they're here to help their community and and be there for every patient um or something along those lines that you see every time you read mission statements um associated with Healthcare and none of that was lived up to that day so there's such a huge difference between uh patient satisfaction and patient experience like they didn't do something well which is the satisfaction piece but on top of it they made me feel like I didn't matter which is the experience piece and on top of not if you didn't do something well but you treated me exceptionally you can maybe rebound from that but if you do both of those things poorly there is no rebounding and the trust is completely broken that was probably a long-winded answer but that's the best way I can describe it I'm actually really glad that you you thank you so much for opening up about this because this is it it's so important to realize this right it's hard to understand unless you can grasp the patient journey and the issue is first of all they would have had no clue that you had moved just moved there right but look at the impact that that has um I want to ask right did you leave a and you don't have to answer this did you leave a review uh so I actually spoke with the manager and I left her a voicemail she called me back back um she was very kind when we spoke and I did have a follow-up appointment because I needed to get my medication so I'm going to treat with somebody else but I had to get my medication so um I kind of had no choice but to go back for the consult but what struck me is that she knew that I scheduled another appointment and she did not call to ask how the appointment was afterwards so she had the opportunity to do continued service recovery and do continuous listening and she didn't and it probably did not occur to her that that would have been a best practice and that's a failure if you are not going the extra mile after you have recovered the service even you should continuously listen to that patient and continuously build Upon A trusting relationship with them to build that loyalty and to show that you have respect for that patient but she never did that and that is such a failure um in terms of the opportunity that she had and I went back and I still did not have a great experience it wasn't the same experience that I had the first time but she knew that I worked for prescy she knew that I was a consultant and I worked in patient experience and I would have been the perfect candidate to get that feedback from she didn't so yeah I can't believe that she didn't capitalize on that opportunity cuz press G is expensive rest game is expensive and they have a survey that they sent out after the fact um which is you know just kind of one of those quick like I don't know if it's like a survey monkey or whatever but they're clearly tracking the experience so then it goes into another conversation about you're tracking this but then what do you do with that data are you doing anything with that data and who has access to it so if you're going to track the experience then please when I give you the feedback make me feel like it matters in your experience right you've had years of this where you've you've been helping members or patients with problems uh do most patients actually make it known that they've had a hard time or having a problem or do they mostly just not this episode of the strategy of Health was sponsored by modality Global advisors modality Global advisors optimizes Hospital Revenue enhances patient experience and delivers proven results visit modality global advisors.com to learn more um it's an interesting question because I used to be a patient advocate and oh man the the amount of grievance letters that I wrote um in my time as a patient advocate I I probably wrote hundreds and hundreds of letters um in that three-year period but I would say that so many patients don't make it known at the time they will make it known after the fact um which is hard for the or organization because it's really difficult to recover the service at that point but that also is on the organization to make sure that you have processes in place where you are using listening tools whether that's through an electronic rounding system or you're going in and speaking you know to the patient and just doing a typical round or a nurse leader round or whatever or when you're doing bedside shift report and making sure that you're engaging with the patient and that their needs are being met um I would say that there's a lot of missed opportunity to actively address or identify issues at the time of care and then you have to work harder uh to perform service recovery if you find out about the situation after the fact but I would also say that a lot of patients don't know that they have ways to express concerns during their care which also falls on the organization the organization whether you're inpatient or outpatient or whatever you need to be alerting your patients that if you have a concern during any point of your care there is someone that you can talk to and to escalate that but for patients that are new to healthcare and maybe it's their first time in an emergency department or it's their first time as an inpatient or whatever they may not know that any of these resources exist to them so it may seem like it's silly when you're talking to someone and they're like saying that they had a negative experience I mean my soon to be sister-in-law uh just had a poor experience at a clinic and she didn't say anything at the time and you think like well why didn't you say something but that's really not fair to the patient and putting the ownership on them like why didn't you say something because if you had a process in place to pulse check what was happening during that visit and round on them or even if you're not uh a leader that's performing rounding and you're a nurse or you're a tech or whatever making sure that that person is having a pleasant experience and that their needs are being met so there's multiple points in a patient's care Journey where that should be happening but it doesn't so patients either don't realize that the opportunity is there for them to discuss concerns or they do it after the fact sometimes because they feel more comfortable than bringing it up um and then that also goes into are you creating a culture of safety and what are your perceptions of safety like for your patients so it's very layered um but the processes need to be in place that you are doing continuous listening for your patient no matter how short their visit is this is really first of this is a great advertisement for the Masters program because you can tell you're like really knowledgeable about this but I'm actually really I'm kind of learning a lot just from what you're saying for my day-to-day job um but I'm gonna ask you a tough question here and this is not against any particular professional this is against the system that creates this but one of the problems is that we do these things we go and we tell the doctor you need to be nice to your patients you know we go into the nursing station we install these things that will alert the Nur nures if the sound level in the nurses station is too high and they end up getting unplugged right we we've done all these interventions that that don't really seem to work why does it happen why do we do these kinds of things over and over but more importantly why don't they work right what actually needs to take place other than scolding you know a Doctor Who's you know seeing so many patients and really doing his best or installing these devices that clearly make the nurses not feel very um respected what is the solution to some of these issues from an organizational level so I will say that like any career path health care or education or if you work in the food service industry whatever some people do not belong in the roles that they are in right it's like you can just tell that they don't have the passion for it so I will say that if you're working in healthcare and you are working with patients either uh in person or you're not on the front lines you have to have a passion for it so the passion has to be there however the passion is there for so many healthcare workers but the problem is that the culture of the organization often does not support that passion and what happens it leads to burnout and then you try to implement patient experience processes that don't work and you didn't get engagement um from the Frontline teams that are supposed to be doing this work and they feel like they're just getting more more and more dumped on them when they have a million other things to do right so I will say this and maintain this until the day that I die that patient experience or customer experience in general cannot happen unless you have employee experience if you do not take care of the person that is taking care of your patient or customer then you can just forget about trying to deliver exceptional patient or customer experiences to your clients it's not going to happen it's not going to happen because this nurse who is supposed to be delivering an exceptional patient experience can't because she feels uncomfortable in her work environment or she's being harassed or he doesn't have the tools that he needs to do his job or he was thrown onto a unit that he's not familiar with because they needed coverage on that unit or there are unsafe uh nurse to Patient ratios so if you do not have a culture in place where you are supporting and caring for your employees then you can throw whatever sound machine on the unit that you want and you can you can tell a doctor up and down you need to be nice to your patient which is another conversation because experience is so much more than about being nice right when I talk about patient experience I am talking about the entire experience so yes being kind and compassionate and having empathy toward your patient is a factor in it but experience is also related to safety and trust and do you have highly reliable processes in your organization where you're not going to have Sentinel events and you know that your nurses are going to feel comfortable and confident in the care that they're delivering and then their patients are also going to feel that so the reason why these initiatives do not work is because the culture does not exist for them to work and I will say this from experience that a lot of times leaders and executives are out of touch and they want results quickly but culture takes time to build and you can't just throw a dart at an initiative and be like okay we're going to work with this for like six weeks and now this doesn't work so now we're going to put something else on you know our team seems nothing is going to devalue Patient experience more than that because you're saying that it's not important that we're going to stick with this initiative now we're moving on to something else and imagine the eye rolles that your nurses are giving when they hear like there's something else that I have to do patient experience needs to be embedded into the culture so that it's part of daily work and it doesn't feel like it's a it's siloed or additional work so I really try to move away from saying PX and I like to say human experience which is what we talk about at presy because I don't want to just talk about the patient the patient is a factor in the entire experience but I need to make sure that everything is going well for that caregiver also um so that's why these initiatives don't work because the culture is not supported to make them work and if you want to see real transformative change in your organization you have to start with your employees and that's through engagement and making sure that the um uh rewards programs that you have for them make sense for them and we're not constantly just giving nurses pizzas for doing a good job are we giving them are we giving them a program that is going to benefit them as a person and them professionally um I don't see that enough in healthcare and patient experience customer experience will not and cannot exist if you do not have a culture where your employees feel valued you can try it and I will tell you it's impossible to make it work and you can keep continuing the cycle and hiring more and more employees but you're just filling a space and not um not appropriately tackling the problem which is culture and no one wants to hear that because it's hard but it's possible no I I completely and and that's that's the scary part too right is you cannot throw more money at it either right salary caps out at somewhere I mean yes like we'd all like to make more money and that's that's fine to say right but if you being subject to violence at work as a nurse how much money until you are okay with that prob I mean I don't really think there's going to be an amount right especially if you're already making enough to provide for your family another 20 30 40 Grand when we saw this during the pandemic salaries went up and up and up and up and nurses kept quitting right just some nurses were making $200,000 a year doing travel nursing and and they were facing burnout and so I think that's scary as well because it's easy to raise salaries sometimes but it's hard to actually like sit down and invest this time um why though is Healthcare and this will be the final question because I know you have so much going on but um industry has done well in this especially the automotive industry traditional manufacturers um for years have done well in this right they figured out the components that make a carfield premium they figured out how if you want quality to go up you have to pay your employees a lot not just in terms of money but also in terms of job security long term Apple has done this right with the way that they build their stores so a lot of industry has figured this out right um why is Healthcare like in a completely different world sometimes when it comes to this right we're still we're still associating you know quality and experience with just being nice or just being kind or you know we still have this idea that if if you don't like your doctor it's a bad experience instead of if you don't like your doctor we can give you someone else that you might mesh with better right we don't we don't even think in that realm yet why are why is the industry like this any ideas on why we're we're kind of behind in a lot of these areas so it's so interesting um when I was working in California there was a hospital that was trying to deliver luxurious experiences right they were trying to make your experience akin to you going to the rits for example if you wanted to have wine with your dinner and your diet allowed for it you could they were investing in these luxurious accommodations and what was that doing for patients and honestly for some patients it was turning them off it was like well this is great that you gave me wine with my dinner but I haven't seen my doctor in two days so where is the priority um are you going to be able to make healthc care a glamorous experience and feel like you're driving a rollsroyce no um but what makes patient experiences exceptional are making your patients feel that they matter and humanizing the experience that otherwise can feel extremely dehumanized so when you go into a patient's room are you sitting down in the chair and speaking with them and asking can I sit down and talk to you um are you explaining that when you touch them like is it okay if I touch you here do you have a preference if I take blood from this arm or blood from this arm or do you have a preference for your blood draw would you like to lay down uh as someone that's scared to death of having my blood drawn there is nothing worse for me than having a FLOTUS that is unkind and isn't taking preferences um into account so I think that we're behind because it is very easy to forget that you're working with another human you see them as a patient and you see them as whatever is listed on their chart and it is so common for us in healthcare that we have these tasks to do we have to get this done we're so busy we have to do this charting and I have to go see this patient and it's very easy to be on autopilot and like lose sight of the setting that you're in whereas if you're in another industry it's very easy to be like this is a customer and I am trying to sell them on something so I want to give them the best experience right but in healthcare that's so much harder and these people are coming to probably at the worst times in their life and the scariest times in their life and it may be end of life for some people and that's hard on the patients families that come in as well so it's difficult I think sometimes to pull ourselves out of the fact that this isn't just a patient this is a person it's not enough to care for our patients we have to care about our patients and that's a distinction that I think is very important but it gets lost in healthc care and if we can try to remember that humanizing care is so important and will result in a luxurious experience because that's really the best thing that you can do for your patients is humanize what they're going through that is how we will get ahead but it all comes back to do you have a culture in place where you are making that possible for your caregivers and that is the battle um that organizations have to face and if you can foster that culture and it is not a question for these nurses that this is the type of care I'm going to deliver to my patients and I can do it because I know that I have the support of my leadership and I have the processes and tools and education that I need to do my job well then everything else will come very incredible advice and very motivating no really seriously very motivating because thank you you know Healthcare is not a people are not products but yet they are the services are but it services on the person right so it's it's completely different but it does get lost in in the the the providing of the care and so um really good advice and I couldn't appreciate you coming on more Britney thank you so much I hope we can have a pleasure thanks for having me yeah no thank you and let's let's stay in touch let me know and of course you'll you'll become a professor so we can all enroll oh yeah I wish one day but uh yeah let let's stay in touch and what a great episode we'll have you on again awesome thank you so much</p>