We believe that listening to the voice of our patients and their caregivers is a powerful way to understand if our intention to deliver patient-centered care is indeed having the intended impact.  

There are several ways we hear from our patients – Patient Family Advisory Councils, complaints/grievances submitted through Customer Service, as well as social media and community feedback. We hear from the largest number of patients through experience surveys. Surveys enable us to gain better perspective on whether we are having our intended impact by going to the patients we serve and asking them directly.  

The patient experience team uses over 20 survey instruments in various care environments across the system. View current survey tools.

When a patient responds to a survey, that information is taken from Qualtrics and fed into a data visualization platform called Tableau. The Patient Experience team has designed reporting to group the responses together in a way that enables leaders to visualize insights specific to their area of responsibility.  

The data itself is broken out into two categories:  

Quantitative Data: Numbers-based data, ‘metrics,’ or ‘scores.’ This is the numerical score received from responses on a specific question. Our institutional focus is on “top box” performance, or, the percentage of patients providing the highest response to a question (e.g. percentage of “Very Good,” or “Extremely Well”).  

Qualitative Data: Word-based, or ‘Narrative’ data. These are the comments or stories written by a patient or caregiver. Narrative data helps us understand the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind the numeric data. 

Use both types of data for success 

We can easily lose ourselves in focusing strictly on the ‘scores,’ and trying to ‘hit the mark’ by hitting a metric. It feels successful to share this information with front-line team members when the team is performing well, but sharing metrics alone doesn’t foster continued growth and innovation. Scores alone miss context and what’s “actionable” from the feedback we receive. That context comes from the voice of our patients.  

Sharing both appreciative and critical feedback is a best practice for engaging the team. Words of appreciation in the actual patient voice (not translated or summarized) has been shown to enhance team member motivation and reduce burnout and emotional exhaustion. Don’t shy away from critical feedback. Understanding when an experience broke down for a patient facilitates deeper understanding of processes, communication, and teamwork improvement opportunities. 

Using both types of data allows us to understand and share patient feedback in a meaningful way, appropriately follow up on the feedback, and widen our perspective from one method of improvement.  

Weekly  

A link to the “Weekly Digest” is emailed every week to help you stay current with patient insights to your operation or clinical practice.  

The report offers a visual of goal performance, comment sentiment/topics for the week, and lists the actual comments patients shared about your team.  

Why weekly: For those clinics/units that see a high volume of feedback, viewing weekly makes reading the comments easier to digest. Scheduling one hour each week to review patient feedback establishes a cadence to listen for trends and share relevant, timely recognition to your team members. It also alerts you to any concerns that should be addressed. 

What does the PX team do weekly with comments?  

• Identify comments for immediate follow-up. The PX team reviews and flags comments with crisis or grievance language (i.e. “suicide;” “harm”) and shares those immediately with Customer Service for follow-up. Managers are notified. 

• Select comments for recognition. 

• Identify Care Provider comments to publish online 

Suggested actions for leaders:  

• Review: read feedback in “All” tab, and/or leverage “Recognition” and “Opportunity” to focus your reading. 

• Recognize 

  • Print a positive comment on a Thank You card and give it to a team member 

  • Export and email all of the “Recognition” comments to your team  

• Make note of any theme and set aside time to brainstorm/deploy a solution (i.e. if patients are sharing that they aren’t able to easily navigate to their appointment, consider wayfinding solutions to help).  

• Work with a member of your team to identify the source of a process breakdown and either (a) offer a refresher on the appropriate workflow, or (b) identify opportunity to improve the process for the whole team.  

For more support on actions to take in follow-up efforts, use this guide.  

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Monthly 

There are several ways to engage with patient experience insights on a monthly basis. These may include: 

• Setting 30 minutes monthly to dive deeper into trending narrative and numeric data.  
• Sharing patient feedback in relevant team and leadership meetings.  

Why monthly: Exploring trending narrative and numeric data helps you understand what behaviors and processes are making a difference to patients. These trends may provide consideration for actions to continue, start, and stop. Sharing patient insights at monthly meetings offer a consistent way to engage the team, leadership, and clinicians. Facilitating conversations to understand where they’re seeing success and challenges in their roles builds alignment around focus areas and next steps. 

Dive into trends 

• Narrative Data provides ‘sentiment analysis’ around all comments for your group. In other words, it allows you to visualize the ‘themes’ and frequency in which they occur. This can help you understand which themes are most important to patients and where to target your recognition and improvement efforts.  

  • If you are a leader of a support services or ancillary team, such as Environmental Services or Nutrition Care Services, this report will allow you to drill into comments specific to your area. 

• Data and Analytics allows you to view all survey response detail. If you want to dig into the performance on every question on your survey this report is the one to review. Consider using this to widen your perspective of improvement opportunity. 

Share in relevant meetings 

Staff Meetings: Sharing patient insights at your monthly staff meeting offers a consistent way to engage the team. Facilitating conversations to understand where they’re seeing success and challenges in their role can allow you to find alignment with patient feedback you’re receiving. Taking that information can help you in prioritizing improvement opportunity – or, how to positively impact patients and your team.  

Steps for preparation: 

1. Open the “Team” report to view overall team performance and how each ‘team member type’ (i.e., Care Provider, Nurse/MA, Registration, etc.) is contributing to that performance.  
2. For example, if you have oversight of the front desk staff, click on the “Registration” header to see trendline performance on questions regarding ‘Courtesy of registration staff’ and ‘Ease of the check-in experience’. If performance is holding steady in ‘courtesy’ but declining in the ease of that experience, the conversation during staff meeting could sound like:  

Recognition: “Patients are continuing to express appreciation for our team’s respectful behavior – specifically the warmth you show when welcoming them to their appointment and your willingness to keep them informed about delays. 89% of patients are giving us the highest rating on this, which tells me that the impact that you’re having on patients through your behavior matters and it shows through the comments they’re sharing.” *Highlight a few of those comments* 

Opportunity: “As we continue to learn from our patients, one area that they want us to be mindful of is how easy the check-in process is – it’s feeling a little harder for some of our patients. I’d like to hear from you – what challenges are you facing right now during the registration process? Has anything changed in the past month to heighten those challenges? I know we’re seeing a lot more patients this month; how are you feeling through that added workload?”  

These conversations are what typically lead to improvement and change that positively impacts both the patients and the team members involved in their visit/stay. 

**Please note, this view is only available to leaders (manager level and above) and should be used with discretion.  

Leadership Meetings: Using a similar approach to a staff meeting, hold a monthly meeting with your Medical Director, or clinician leader, to view trends and themes together. Reviewing this information together supports 

• A broadened perspective to glean insights 
• Better coordination of efforts in recognizing the team (including clinicians) 
• Alignment on improvement work 

If you need support in these conversations, your Patient Experience leader can help.  

Quarterly  

Individual one-on-one (1:1) meetings are a foundational way to build trust and psychological safety with team members. These short meetings are cornerstones to have in place in order to effectively coach someone on behavior.  

Why bring patient feedback to 1:1s: Bringing the voice of the patient into this conversation can help connect the individual to their purpose, allow the patient to underscore the positive impact they’re having, and better understand what they can specifically work on to help in enhancing that impact. Using the “Individual” report can help in the facilitation of this conversation. Consider this structure to navigate this:  

• Opening: orient the team member to the report and offer a refresher on why we listen to the voice of our patients.  

• Sharing: offer a quick overview of quantitative performance, but add context and richness to the conversation by taking time to recognize the area(s) patients appreciate about them. Highlight specific comments that recognize their efforts.  

• Opportunity: use phrases like “here’s what patients appreciate most about you AND I think you can create an even greater impact by ____. What are your thoughts?” 

• Listen: spend more time listening than speaking. Asking questions to better understand what helps in feeling connected to caring for others can provide clarity for you in coaching them and refining their approach.   

• Close: thank them – sincerely. No matter the role someone fills – every person in our organization has an impact on patients and their colleagues.