Reinventing The Patient Experience: Strategies For Hospital Leaders

Reinventing the Patient Experience: Strategies for Hospital Leaders

Are you proud of the patient experience your hospital provides? Are you confident that your hospital is the provider of choice in your community? Does your hospital provide the experience you would want for your family members or friends if they were hospitalized? The emerging age of consumerism in healthcare is forcing hospitals to reexamine their traditional practices and provide greater sensitivity and responsiveness to patient preferences. Conventional customer service training is no longer enough. Reinventing the Patient Experience provides the advice and inspiration you need to make significant changes in the way your patients experience care in your hospital. The book draws lessons from the experiences of hospitals considered innovators in patient-centered care. This diverse group of organizations illustrates how integrating "high touch" and "high tech" care is possible at hospitals of all types and sizes. You will learn what strategies they put in place, what barriers they faced, how they moved past roadblocks, and what their keys to success were. Leaders from these pioneering organizations share how they tackled various implementation and operational issues in the areas of physical environment, nursing services, complementary therapies, spirituality, leadership, and sustainability. Explore these four components of patient-focused care: * Designing facilities to minimize stress, support family involvement, and remove physical barriers between nurses and patients * Emphasizing a personalized relationship between nurses and patients, with more "hands-on" care provided by nurses at the bedside * Increasing the availability and use of complementary therapies in an inpatient setting to meet the general increase in patient demand for these therapies * Moving beyond the traditional role of the hospital chaplain and training hospital staff to provide spiritual support for patients and family membersAbout the AuthorJon B. Christianson, PhD, holds his doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin Madison and is currently the James A. Hamilton Chair in Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health, University of Minnesota. His research interests include health insurance, employer initiatives in healthcare, healthcare markets, pay for performance, organizational change in healthcare, and the translation of evidence-based medicine into practice. Michael D. Finch, PhD, received his degree in sociology from the University of Minnesota. After 14 years on the faculty of the Division of Health Services Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, he left to become Director of Research Programs for UnitedHealth Group. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Samueli Institute and a member of the graduate faculty at the University of Minnesota and has appointments in the Carlson School of Management, the School of Public Health, and the Department of Sociology. His most recent research includes a study on the effects of surgical volume on outcomes in hospitals, an assessment of guideline performance for diabetes, the cost and financing of end-of-life care, and an evaluation of the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey. Barbara Findlay, RN, is vice president of the Optimal Healing Environments Program at the Samueli Institute. From 1997 to 2003, she was with the Tzu Chi Institute for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she served as coordinator for Clinical Research and Professional Practice and then executive director. Between 2003 and 2005, she held a senior leadership position with the BC NurseLine, a British Columbia Ministry of Health telenursing initiative. Ms. Findlay s early professional background includes more than 20 years as a staff nurse in a variety of clinical settings, including inner-city emergency departments, and as an educator for patients and health professionals in a community hospital