October 9, 2017 – Patient Experience

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Anchor lead: How can studying the experience of patients in the hospital help improve things? Elizabeth Tracey reports

If you’ve been a patient in a hospital lately, you’ve likely been given a questionnaire to evaluate your experience. Fill it out. That’s the advice of Lisa Allen, chief patient experience officer at Johns Hopkins, who says these surveys really do matter and result in scientific scrutiny of how to improve things. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, she cites such a study of people’s negative experiences in the emergency department.

Allen: Sometimes it was as simple as I didn’t alert people I was here, so needing to make a phone call. What we did was we put advocates into the emergency department so anybody who is getting ready to be admitted they try to make them as comfortable as possible while they’re waiting for a bed in the hospital, and then after they settle into their unit the same individuals go up and see them and they do what we’ve called a warm welcome, getting them settled into their room. By studying what happens when you go from needing to be in an emergency room to needing to be in the hospital we put in this human intervention.  :32

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.