Background: Patient experience (PEX) is not only a metric guiding a hospital’s performance-based compensation-system and STAR rating, but also a very important indicator of personalized care and hospital staff’s relationship with patients. Challenges in the post- COVID healthcare climate (increased staff burnout, disengagement, financial strains on patients and health systems) have been affecting overall PEX. Following the Triple Aim Principle of Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), our institution is shifting focus from operational friction to work on provider empathy in improving our PEX .
Purpose: Our system consists of four hospital pavilions with a total of 828 beds, with the Division of Hospital Medicine having 89 physicians and 11 advanced practice providers (APPs). This large provider group carries a heavy load of system’s physician communication scores. When analyzing patient’s responses to Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey (HCAHPS), we identified lack of empathetic communication as most important driver of negative patients’ feedback. In July 2023, we launched a system wide Empathy Connection initiative to help guiding our staff to more empathetic approach in patient care.
Description: Empathy Connections include implementation of empathy statements with every patient, every day. Empathy statements include “What concerns do you have today that I can help you with?”, used daily by all staff members and “What concerns do you have about going home ?”, used on a day of discharge . Team members are coached to use empathy statements by PEX team and department leaders during empathy sessions. We also shared print-outs, included Empathy Connections discussions and reminders during the regular staff meetings and introduced leader rounds to reinforce the intervention. To assess the effectiveness of the initiative, we have been monitoring the Press Ganey (PG) scores by the discharge date. We are aiming to achieve our corporate targets for physician communication (78.9%, 44th percentile rank) . Nursing communication has been monitored to compare the potential impact of empathy statements use on physician communication. Our physician and nursing communication trends , since implementation of Empathy Connections in July 2023 are shown in fig 1. and fig 2. As shown in fig.1 , before implementing Empathy Connections, our physician communication reached our hospital system’s target only once- in December 2022. Since Empathy Connection implementation beginning in July 2023, we have reached the target three times. Fig. 2 represents nursing communication, with no significant trend change noted since our intervention.
Conclusions: Empathy Connection initiative has been showing promising results. Some observed obstacles are consistent staff engagement and inconsistencies in implementation of the intervention between hospital pavilions. Moving forward, we plan on expanding intervention to our consulting physicians and explore the use of statements by the nursing teams.
