Many Long Term Care Facilities, are implementing a variety of strategies to improve the patient experience —an issue that’s rapidly becoming a top priority in health care. The Accountable Care Act now links performance related to patient-experience metrics to reimbursement. For the first time, the pay of Long Term Care Facilities and eventually individual providers will be partly based on how they are rated by patients. Few disagree on the importance and the need to be more patient centric, but what exactly is the “patient experience”?

1. UNDERSTANDING THE DRIVERS OF THE PATIENT
EXPERIENCE

2. Many Long Term Care Facilities, are implementing a variety of
strategies to improve the patient experience —an issue that’s
rapidly becoming a top priority in health care. The Accountable
Care Act now links performance related to patient-experience
metrics to reimbursement. For the first time, the pay of Long
Term Care Facilities and eventually individual providers will be
partly based on how they are rated by patients. Few disagree
on the importance and the need to be more patient centric, but
what exactly is the “patient experience”?
A industry survey asked top leaders of Long Term Care Facilities
(CEOs, COOs, and others) what was necessary to improve the
patient experience. The top six recommendations included:
new facilities, private rooms, food on demand, unrestricted
visiting hours, and more quiet time so patients could rest. There
was one problem with them: They were not based on a
systematic examination of what most patients really wanted. In
other words, the executives wanted to focus on what they felt
were important drivers of the patient experience but didn’t
know for sure.
To truly improve the patient experience, it is important to get
the patient’s perspective.

3. For example, consider a patient who consistently uses the health care system,
someone with multiple, chronic medical conditions that remain incurable and
are only treatable from a maintenance standpoint. If he doesn’t feel that his
caregivers are compassionate, that may heavily influence his overall perception
of the experience. Since his relationship with health care givers is more
prolonged (or permanent), he may need more of the “human side” of caring.
Why is it important for caregivers to know the drivers of patient experience?
First, not being clear about the drivers can often be a significant barrier to
launching a patient-experience initiative. Second, knowing the drivers helps
leaders identify the most effective ways to achieve quick victories. Third, the
economics of the levers is quite different. Improving some of these dimensions
(such as providing private rooms) would be cost prohibitive for most Long Term
Care Facilities. Others (such as improving communication between patients
and caregivers) could reduce the overall cost of providing health care and also
improve medical outcomes.
Faced with the task of understanding the drivers of patient experience, health
care organizations have taken — and can take — multiple approaches to
discerning the drivers of patient experience. Below, we review briefly some of
the innovative approaches to better understand patient needs that have been
tried in various organizations

4. Create patient advisory councils. A very simple but effective
approach in many contexts is to identify a group of patients that can
act as the customers’ “voice” within the organizations. It is easy for
an organization to lose touch with its customers’ evolving needs.
Today, Voice of the Patient Advisory Councils are used to ensure that
the organization does not lose track of patients’ needs. Councils
have assisted with redesigning waiting rooms, providing advice on
improving the admission guide, and helping managers better
understand communication needs in the facility.
Dig deeper into patients’ experiences. Long Term Care Facilities can
use data from the Care Analytics Assessment Platform— the
patient-satisfaction surveys conducted compare how their
performance compares with that of other U.S. Long Term Care
Facilities. Long Term Care Facilities can leverage the data better by
both digging deeper into the data and paying attention to anecdotal
comments and complaints. This allows Long Term Care Facilities to
understand not only how their patients feel about their experience
but also why they felt the way they did.

5. Have leaders make regular rounds. At Premier Long Term Care
Facilities across the country, senior make a habit of wandering
throughout the Facility and talking to patients, their families,
and caregivers (including physicians, nurses, food-service
workers, and environmental-service workers who clean the
rooms. These rounds need to be done on a regular basis and at
least once a month. Such direct contact provides leaders with a
firsthand understanding of patient needs.
Leaders of health care organizations in recent years have
focused primarily on delivering superior medical outcomes at
lower costs. In addition, they also need to focus on improving
the patient experience. A poor experience compromises a
facilities reputation among patients and other physicians and
adversely affects employees’ engagement levels. Moreover,
with the changes in the reimbursement policies in many
countries, it can have a negative impact on a facilities
economics. But improving the patient experience will be hard
to do without a better understanding of what patients really
want. We hope others will offer comments and share what
they’ve learned from their own efforts to understand what
drives patient satisfaction.

6. Care Analytics is a tablet-based software that assesses Long Term Care Facilities and provides feedback to make quality
improvements for patient satisfaction in real time.
To advance the patient experience, providers must understand patient needs and address targeted opportunities within patient
populations. Care Analytics provides meaningful and actionable insights into every aspect of patient perception. We work with
facilities across the globe to collect feedback through real-time point of care tablet based assessments. We provide straight-forward
steps focusing on the key drivers of exceptional patient experiences. Our model is based on the marriage of big data and years of
experience with improving patient satisfaction
UNLEASH TARGETED INSIGHTS THROUGH ADVANCED ANALYTICS

7. CONTACT
US
www.careanalytics.net
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