Note from Mindy: In her fourth contribution to Rewarding Health, Amy Kramer, Healthcare Sector Strategist at Maritz, addresses the correlation between hospital employee satisfaction and patient satisfaction. At Maritz, Amy provides industry expertise in the areas of healthcare and wellness and works with clients and account teams in addressing business challenges.
If you have not heard HCAHP (pronounced H-CAPS) scores have gone public! March of 2008 marked the first publically shared scores that provide consumers with insight into patient satisfaction ratings hospitals receive. HCAHP stands for (Hospital Consumer Assessments for Healthcare Providers and Systems) and they represent the patient’s perspective of the care they received while in-stay at a hospital.
In May of 2005, CMS and NQF formally endorsed the HCAHPs process and worked together to develop a system-wide standardized assessment and reporting structure to ensure that every hospital that participates can be measured by the same patient satisfaction ratings. Hospitals that participate in the survey must follow the guidelines outlined by CMS and NQF. This was positive for hospitals with high scores because it validated a high patient satisfaction with services and can ultimately encourage more health plans and physician referrals, and drive more admissions and profits for the hospitals. However, hospitals with lower scores were immediately highlighted and now exposed to the public. Every hospital must participate in the assessments if they want to receive their IPPS payment. Those who don’t participate not only suffer from the financial element of not being reimbursed, but it also raises the question “What are you trying to hide?”
What does this mean for hospitals? I think that as characteristics of consumerism slowly creep into the healthcare market that these types of data points (satisfaction, cost, quality) become increasingly prevalent and more readily accessible. I also think that hospitals have an opportunity to place more emphasis on how to deliver a better patient experience. Beyond the health outcome, which is obviously an important factor in assessing a patient’s experience, there are more subtle drivers such as empathy, humanity, responsiveness, and all of these attributes that will be rated lead back to one common place – the touchpoints that a hospital has with the patient and the employees that engage in those touchpoints. Since HCAHP scores are accessible to the general population on the Health and Human Services site hospitals need to be considering what message those scores deliver to consumers who have become more active in their choice for care.
Reshaping the patient experience starts with those who touch the patient through their stay. Research shows that patient satisfaction is driven by employee satisfaction. Recognizing the top performers in an organization is only the beginning. For hospitals to achieve consistently high patient satisfaction they have to create a culture that inspires care givers to focus on the patient experience. A key element to success will be a hospital’s ability to “Move the Middle” essentially leveraging the strengths of their average employees and motivating them to higher performance standards. Employee engagement is critical within hospitals and health systems. Hospitals need to implement a robust employee engagement and customer experience program to encourage better performance in delivering outstanding customer experience. This will prove to be successful not only for the hospital and their satisfaction scores but for better patient health too.
