Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Covid-19 Vaccine Perception And Hesitancy Among Uninsured Free Clinic Patients, Samin Panahi, Brenda Spearman, Justine Sundrud, Mason Lunceford, Akiko Kamimura

Patient Experience Journal

There are many complexities regarding the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines, mainly because the COVID-19 vaccine had a fast track of development compared to vaccines developed in the past years. The purpose of this study is to understand COVID-19 vaccine perception and hesitancy among uninsured free clinic patients using the theory of planned behavior. This study had seven focus groups with 37 total participants, including 19 Spanish speakers. Free clinic adult patients (over the age of 18) participated in four focus groups during Summer of 2021. The average age of the participants was 44.7, and the majority of the participants self-identified …

“Not Your Father’S Heart”: How Healthcare Discrimination For Neurodivergent Patients Taught Me About The Human Experience, Cate Murphy

Patient Experience Journal

It is easy to assume all patients who come into a hospital for acute crisis care have a clear understanding of how their experience will be facilitated. When a patient is neurodivergent, they cannot always agree to needed intervention. This is exacerbated by the “poor timing” of questions portrayed to impact the critical care received, sometimes irreparably. This is my story of watching my young, active partner suffer two massive heart attacks and refuse intervention because he was ashamed to admit he had not seen a doctor in over thirty years. Due to his neurodivergence, he could not process questions …

Investing In The Bottom Line: The Value Case For Improving Human Experience In Healthcare, Jason A. Wolf, Vishal Bhalla, Brian Carlson, Jennifer Carron, Lanie Dixon, Julie K. Oehlert, Brant J. Oliver

Patient Experience Journal

Investment in human experience is imperative for healthcare organizations. It is a strategic focus that can lead to great benefits. Those that overlook experience, seeing it as “simply” about satisfaction or survey data, do so at great cost to their organization, team members, and most importantly those we serve – patients. A commitment to human experience – integrating the patient, workforce, and community experience – is essential for all healthcare organizations in realizing the goals they strive for and the impact they aspire to achieve. It leads to high-quality outcomes for those they care for. It creates a positive environment …

The Evolution Of Patient Experience: From Holistic Care To Human Experience, Corey Adams, Reema Harrison, Jason A. Wolf

Patient Experience Journal

Patient experience has evolved as a critical concept and outcome in health systems internationally. Evolving from consumer-led movements, coupled with shifts in the positioning of patients among clinical professions, the global focus on patient experience is now evident in nationally mandated measurement tools, the creation of dedicated institutional leadership roles, and outlets such as the Patient Experience Journal. By critically analysing the pivotal factors and milestones that have shaped its evolution throughout healthcare history, this review provides an in-depth exploration of the evolution of patient experience. In doing so, the review provides a critical analysis of the application of patient …

Looking Back To Move Forward: The Next Decade And Beyond For Human Experience, Jason A. Wolf

Patient Experience Journal

This issue comes out at an important moment for the experience conversation. It was ten years ago from the publication date of this issue on April 30, 2014, that the first issue of Patient Experience Journal (PXJ) was released. PXJ was intended to be a gathering place. A virtual town square for the experience movement where people could and would come together to share ideas and proven practice. This value of collaboration is at the foundation of our very efforts as a global community through The Beryl Institute. Experience is not some secret competitive ingredient in the world of healthcare. …

Breaking The Transactional Mindset: A New Path For Healthcare Leadership Built On A Commitment To Human Experience, Kirsten Krull, Jerry Mansfield, Jennifer Gentry, Karen Grimley, Barbara Jacobs, Jason Wolf

Patient Experience Journal

Numerous health care publications have focused on the compelling need to improve patient experience and the associated improvements necessary to address workforce well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated and illuminated long-standing problems in health care including workforce shortages, inequity in health care delivery outcomes, care provider burnout, and overall societal structural racism.^1,2 The Beryl Institute’s Nursing Executive Council (NEC) manuscript Rebuilding a Foundation of Trust: A Call to Action in Creating a Safe Environment for Everyone³ focused on actions and behaviours to heal relationships and build trust between care providers and leaders with commitments to safety, empathy, shared decision …

Four Commitments For The Future Of Healthcare: Reflecting On A Decade Of Patient Experience Journal, Jason A. Wolf

Patient Experience Journal

This issue closes the first decade of Patient Experience Journal’s (PXJ) contribution to evidence and innovation, to sharing stories and research, to elevating the conversation and pushing the boundaries of the experience movement. We have never hesitated to nudge at the status quo or to respond with agility to the challenging moments we have faced. We have welcomed diverse voices as contributors, and we have seen an even more diverse readership. In reviewing the pages of PXJ over the last decade, we see a true evolution of the experience movement itself. The words of our contributors have provided a lens …

Special Issue 2024: Transforming Experience In Non-Hospital Settings, Patient Experience Journal

Patient Experience Journal

Patient Experience Journal(PXJ) is excited to announce the call for submissions for its July/August 2024 special issue focused on exploring how healthcare organizations are transforming experience in non-hospital settings. So much of the experience conversation has been focused on and driven by the hospital setting – from acute care, to pediatrics, safety net hospitals and more. While this focus remains essential to some of the most critical care delivered in the healthcare ecosystem, it is important to recognize the volume of care being provided in new and existing settings. This special issue seeks to uncover and elevate the practices …

The Frontier For Human Experience Is Closer Than We Think, Jason A. Wolf

Patient Experience Journal

When we think of frontiers, we think of boundaries between the known and unknown, the edge we see in the distance, something that is always just over the horizon. Yet when we step into what was once the frontier, the horizon moves on us, with new distances to cross, edges to reach. It is this dynamic of frontiers, wrapped in our individual and shared experiences of the last few years that shape this very special issue. It is also why now more than ever frontiers are an important part of our transformation. Frontiers that push us beyond where we can …

Building On A Decade Of Hope: Why We Must Champion The Human Experience, Jason A. Wolf

Patient Experience Journal

The pages of PXJ have served a primary purpose, to expand the evidence on patient experience and push the boundaries of innovation in this critical work. But through this commitment, PXJ has seen much more happen. The contributions of our thousands of authors, reviewers and editors have also fostered an environment of connection. PXJ has emerged as something more than just a journal. It has become a place for conversation. It has served as a conduit for expanding excellence in practice. It has fostered new thinking. And it has broadened our global community. There is something very special found on …

Navigating The “Perfect Storm”: Leading With A Commitment To Human Experience, Jason A. Wolf Phd

Patient Experience Journal

As was known even prior to the pressures placed on us by the pandemic, what lied just beneath the surface of our work in healthcare was clear. A healthcare workforce feeling overworked and overwhelmed. Communities seeing and feeling the impact of inequities and disparities in care. Patients and care partners working diligently to elevate what matters to them. A tearing at the social fabric that has led to incivility and even mortal violence. And healthcare systems laboring to maintain financial viability in the face of global economic uncertainties. We knew the opportunities then, and we cannot escape them now. This …

Special Issue – July/August 2023: Emerging Frontiers In Human Experience, Patient Experience Journal

Patient Experience Journal

Patient Experience Journal (PXJ) is excited to announce the call for submissions for its July/August 2023 special issue focused on exploring the emerging frontiers of human experience in healthcare. As shared in the recent PXJ article, Reexamining “Defining Patient Experience”: The human experience in healthcare: "The rapid evolution in the recognition of the humanity in healthcare has required us to view the human healthcare experience not just as a person-centered process or relationship-based encounter. It is an intricate tapestry of human interaction both in the clinical and non-clinical settings across the continuum of care and into the communities served …

Teamwork That Affects Outcomes: A Method To Enhance Team Ownership, Brian Carlson, Richelle Graham, Brad Stinson, Jordan Larocca

Patient Experience Journal

Healthcare is the ultimate team sport, and this case study explores how to build teamwork across teams. The ability for nursing, environmental services and food and nutrition services to work collaboratively to benefit patients is paramount to a patients experience and outcomes. The case study describes how the work was done to build teams and then improved outcomes in both patient and employee experiences. The learnings are applicable to any team setting not just those described in this case study.

Experience Framework

This article is associated with the Staff & Provider Engagement lens of The Beryl Institute Experience Framework ( …

Human Experience Is Not A Line Item, Jason A. Wolf

Patient Experience Journal

Our humanity is fundamentally defined in context with others, in our relationships that reinforce or bend who we are, in the interactions through which we wither or grow. It is these interactions that rest squarely at the heart of the healthcare experience. For over a decade, we have defined experience in The Beryl Institute community as the sum of all interactions, shaped by an organization’s culture that influence patient perceptions across the continuum of care. The power of the simple, yet significant nature of these words reinforces the idea that experience happens primarily at the touch point between people. …

Beyond Hcahps: Analysis Of Patients’ Comments Provides An Expanded View Of Their Hospital Experiences, Andrew S. Gallan, Rakesh Niraj, Awanindra Singh

Patient Experience Journal

An important concern for health care professionals is that standardized patient surveys may not fully capture all the topics that are important to patients. As a result, health care professionals may not have a complete picture of what their patients experience. The purpose of this research is to utilize a state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing technique to make sense of patients’ solicited, unstructured comments to gain a deeper and broader understanding of their experiences in the hospital. We analyzed a large dataset of inpatient survey responses (48,592 patients generating 65,998 comments) by a patient experience survey vendor for an eleven-hospital health …

Measuring What Matters: A Proposal For Reframing How We Evaluate And Improve Experience In Healthcare, Alpa Vyas, Lisa Allen, Anne Brown, Jennifer Carron, Cassandra Crowe-Jackson, Rick Evans, Kevin Gwin, Jason A. Wolf

Patient Experience Journal

The conversation on measuring experience has been a long and thoughtful one. It has reflected a dynamic tension between measures used as a lever for action in some health systems and as a mechanism to determine reimbursable dollars in others. Yet underlying all the conversation, the question of what we measure, to what end we measure and what truly matters to those who experience care remains. Through a series of conversations over the last two years senior experience leaders across healthcare organizations determined it is time to assess the current landscape of patient experience measurement, to acknowledge what the existing …

The Effect Of Service Excellence Training: Examining Providers' Patient Experience Scores, Katelyn J. Cavanaugh, Monica A. Johnson, Courtney L. Holladay

Patient Experience Journal

Previous research and applied work has shown that communication-based training has the potential to impact important outcomes for healthcare organizations. Our institution developed and deployed Service Excellence, a communications-focused training, in our large academic cancer-focused healthcare system. In this study, we investigated whether patient experience improved for those with care providers who completed Service Excellence, as measured by Press Ganey Provider Experience surveys, and whether the effect of Service Excellence training depends on employee engagement. Results indicated that participating in Service Excellence training positively impacts perceptions of patient experience, and that the impact of the training is stronger for providers …

Using Design-Thinking To Investigate And Improve Patient Experience, Jennifer Smiechowski, Megan Mercia, Kyle Kemp, Elizabeth Oddone Paolucci, Maria Santana, Rahim Kachra

Patient Experience Journal

Understanding and enhancing the patient experience can lead to improved healthcare outcomes. The purpose of this study was to capture a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the patient experience on an inpatient medical teaching unit in order to identify key deficiencies and unmet needs. We then aim to implement a design-thinking methodology to find innovative ways to solve these deficiencies. Here we present the first two phases of this four-phased study. We retrospectively and prospectively collected quantitative data about patient experience with the Canadian Patient Experiences Survey-Inpatient Care. We then used this data to guide patient interviews. We identified several …

Development And Reliability Of A Patient Experience Inventory Tool For Hospitals, Agnes Barden, Nicole Giammarinaro, Natalie Bashkin, Larry Lutsky

Patient Experience Journal

This study explores the development and reliability testing of the newly developed Patient Experience Inventory for Hospitals (PXI-H). Created as an organizational self-assessment patient experience tool, it guides healthcare leaders in evaluating attitudes and behaviors as well as structures and programs impacting patient experience within a hospital setting. The PXI-H is organized within four pillars: Leadership, Education and Development, Data and Analytics and Patient-and-Family Centeredness, which were determined to be internally consistent based on examining coefficient alphas and the item-total correlations. Principal component analysis also determined items with highest loadings aligned onto the pillars in which there were assigned, confirming …

Seven Steps To Successful Change: How A Large Academic Medical Center Prepared Patients For Organizational Change, Brian Carlson, Madison Agee, Terrell Smith, Paul Sternberg Jr, Jason Morgan

Patient Experience Journal

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) launched a new electronic health record (EHR) in a “big bang” implementation that saw the new software go live across multiple hospitals, clinics and geographic locations in a single morning. The organization rightly focused most of its energy on preparing its nearly 25,000 employees for the impacts of the transition, but it also considered the effects that would be felt by its patients and families. Survey data indicate that patient satisfaction scores demonstrably dip before, during and after an EHR implementation, and take approximately a year to recover. A team at DMC employed a seven-step …

A Next-Day, Brief E-Survey Overcomes The Excessive Variability Seen In Cahps-Style Emergency Department Surveys So That Individual Physician Performance Can Be Assessed On A Regular Basis, Tom Scaletta, Eva Hare, Christopher Sung Lee

Patient Experience Journal

Traditional CAHPS-style emergency department (ED) surveys result in excessive variability when assessing individual physician performance. The objective of this study is to measure the variability of a brief, electronic survey (e-survey). The study team also measured the association of individual physicians to demographic data, physician and patient factors, and a physician burnout assessment tool. Data from SmartContact (SmartER, La Grange, IL) is a next-day, e-survey that takes about 30-seconds to complete. This tool was used by a hospital-employed emergency department (ED) group during calendar year 2017 across 2 EDs and 37 physicians.^1,2 Variability was estimated regarding raw patient experience …

How To Build A Robust Provider Improvement Partnership Program To Enhance Patient Experience – A Case Study, Venkat Iyer, Pamela Prissel, Karee Munson, Jennifer Eide, Rebecca Brustad, Nickie Kranz, Lukas P. Madson, Beverly Frase

Patient Experience Journal

Patient experience is emerging as a key differentiating factor in patients’ choice of healthcare system. Many healthcare organizations are attempting to improve their patient experience by data-driven, patient-centered initiatives. This involves engaging all staff along all the contact points of a patient’s journey in healthcare. Perhaps, the physicians or care providers are most important link in this chain but also the most challenging to engage in improvement efforts. Most healthcare organizations have some training or workshops to educate providers on communication skills and other tools to enhance patient experience. However, there seems to a paucity of a standardized approach or …

Using Appreciative Inquiry As A Framework To Enhance The Patient Experience, Kerry Moorer Mba, Schawan Kunupakaphun, Elilzabeth Delgado, Matthew Moody, Christina Wolf Msn, Rn, Cnl, Karen Moore Rn, Ms, Fache, Pracha Eamranond Md, Mph

Patient Experience Journal

The following case depicts the journey of a non-profit hospital in an under-served community and its attempts to turn around suffering patient experience. The Hospital turned to the theories of Appreciative Inquiry and the power of a strengths-based approach to create a framework to support the patient experience initiatives. Hospital leadership led the formation of a Patient Experience Team to implement ten initiatives in order increase the top box score in the domain of willingness to recommend the hospital, as that was selected as a global measure of success for the overall improvement project.

Leadership Development Practices And Patient Satisfaction: An Exploratory Study Of Select U.S. Academic Medical Centers, Chien-Ching Li, Peter Barth, Andrew N. Garman, Matthew M. Anderson, Peter W. Butler

Patient Experience Journal

Interest has been growing among academic medical centers (AMCs) in organization-wide strategies that may improve patient satisfaction. Although leadership development programs have been cited as a potentially useful approach, thus far almost all evidence has come from single-organization case studies. The present study sought to examine potential relationships between leadership development and patient experience across organizations. Data for leadership development practices were obtained from a survey conducted by the National Center for Healthcare Leadership. Patient experience data were obtained from the U.S. Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS). Multivariate analyses (general linear regressions) were performed to examine …

Why Human Resources Policies And Practices Are Critical To Improving The Patient Experience, Shari Berman

Patient Experience Journal

While providing patient-centered care seems to be a goal for many organizations, delivering on this goal requires practices which are embedded in the organization, which incent patient-centered behavior. The author argues Human Resources (HR) policies, procedures and programs are key to supporting an organizations’ vision and culture. This means an HR executive partnering with the CEO who sets the vision and HR builds programs to support the vision. As the organization understands what is important to patients and how to best serve them, HR can build patient care improvement into every aspect of the organization. The author describes how competency …

Patient And Family Partner Involvement In Staff Interviews: Designing, Implementing, And Evaluating A New Hiring Process, Sara-Grey M. Charlton, Shannon Parsons, Kimberly Strain, Agnes T. Black, Candy Garossino, Leanne Heppell

Patient Experience Journal

Healthcare organizations in Canada and the United States are seeking to enhance their ability to offer patient and family centred care (PFCC). One aspect of PFCC is the participation of Patient and Family Partners (PFPs) in a variety of roles within healthcare organizations. This article describes the creation and evaluation of a hiring process that utilized a PFCC interview tool (PFCCIT) and collaborated with PFPs in interviewing candidates for healthcare positions. An evaluation of the new hiring process was designed, including an on-line survey of candidates and semi-structured interviews with healthcare leaders and PFPs. Survey results indicated candidates felt the …