Process Paper- Improving Patient Satisfaction in a hospital setting

Our hospitals utilize a company that polls our patients to determine the degree of their satisfaction with our services during their hospital stay. This is known as "Patient Satisfaction". Despite the fact that every patient that comes through the Endoscopy Department at MRMC receives top notch care is not always evident in the scores. Our Administration only looks at the Percentile ranking to determine how we are doing. This ranking is the comparison of our unit's scores against another like facility. The scores many be within points of one another, but the rank is the entire focus. Despite the fact that we have good scores about 60% of our patients rank us as "Excellent" with the remainder ranking us as "Very Good", our percentile ranking is low. The goal is to reach the 90th percentile ranking. We are working on the following to help impact our scores and encourage the "Excellent" scores:

1. The management team meets biweekly with Administration to look at the scores and look for improvements in the scores
2. The Administration sends out the weekly scores via email to the management teams
3. We (the managment team) have developed additional measures in order to affect and improve our departmental scores

• Initate Team Cards that are given to the patients at the discharge point of their care. These cards thank the patients for utilizing our services with the signature of each staff member that took care of them during their procedure. It also gives the Administrative contacts if the patient or family would like to notify us of concerns or compliments of a staff member.
• Share and post scores with the staff members so that they are aware of the Key Drivers (the areas that are our most focus) and the progress that the team is making.
• Leadership rounding on the patients and families to find out what we could do to improve our services and care. This will also give us the opportunity to improve the services before the patient leaves the facility.
• Inform our patients that our goal is to "Provide Excellent Care". We do this with the team card and by informing them of our goals during rounding. Also, our staff use the "Excellent" word while delivering care to the patient.
• Leadership teams walk around and look for ways to improve our services. Whether it is cosmetically or work in teams to improve processes that are within the dept or work with another dept.
• Update scripting used by staff during the post procedure phone call to the patient.
• Have the staff sign up and attend the "Lighting the Way" series classes to improve customer service.