Is Your Healthcare IT Client Considering The Patient Experience?
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
As the healthcare industry progresses toward Meaningful Use Stage 3, the patient experience will become even more important to decision-makers at your IT client’s organizations … so much so that many are opening up positions for the chief experience officer (CXO).
According to Healthcare IT News, Vocera Communications has released the results of its survey of over 100 senior level executives in its first Humanizing Efficiency in Healthcare report. The results have revealed a need in healthcare organizations to humanize data and kick off initiatives to keep team members supported and engaged in personalizing their work. Many facilities still struggle to find an alignment between quality, safety, and experience strategies. Elizabeth Boehm, director of the Experience Innovation Network weighed in in a press statement: “As more organizations implement Lean Six Sigma and high reliability programs, we aim to define the ideal intersection between efficiency efforts and solutions that restore empathy, respect and human connections to healthcare. It takes a concerted and systematic effort to drive alignment across these historically siloed disciplines.”
The Central Role Of Data
Much of moving healthcare organizations toward centralizing around the patient experience involves tracing data that connects with the patient story.
Many of your clients likely already have multiple data-centered solutions in place, but it’s also likely that they aren’t actively connecting with input from patients and families, let alone building processes to genuinely tune in to the patient voice — while the survey found that half of the respondents defined value as “patient-oriented satisfaction,” only a meager 6 percent of respondents indicated that their patients were either always or usually involved in the gathering and discovery process.
These results help underscore the fact that the concept of humanizing data is still new to most healthcare organizations, leaving them in a position where leaders with the emerging skill set of humanizing data are in high demand. Bridget Duffy, MD, chief medical officer of Vocera, told Healthcare IT News: “To be successful, organizations can no longer solely focus on stripping out waste and reducing cost as a growing body of evidence points to patient, family and staff experience as key drivers for transforming healthcare. We must identify technologies and design processes that hardwire humanity at every point of care.”
For solutions providers, this means that when are you communicating the value of your solutions and services, you will need to begin planning communication not only from a new perspective, but with a new brand of executive.