Hospitals must define patient experience

Guest post by Jason A. Wolf, Ph.D., president of The Beryl Institute, a global community of practice focused on patient experience improvement and founding editor of Patient Experience Journal. Follow Jason @jasonawolf, The Beryl Institute @berylinstitute and Patient Experience Journal @pxjournal on Twitter.

In my most recent Hospital Impact blog, I reinforced the simple, but significant need to focus on three Ps of patient experience, offering that at the core of this idea is the central purpose on which an organization builds its experience effort.

I closed with, "I see one consistent action in those organizations achieving success. They are clear on who they are, what they want achieve and where they are going. This is the idea of definition I often speak to and reinforce." Yet with this fundamental importance, defining patient experience remains an elusive idea for many. In fact, it's a question people ask me frequently: How do we define patient experience for our organization?

I'm not surprised, as recent benchmarking research discovered only 45 percent of U.S. hospitals had a formal definition of patient experience for their organization. While people may have clear personal purpose in healthcare, the foundation on which organizations build their patient experience efforts in many cases is shaky at best.

At The Beryl Institute we developed--and now people in many healthcare organizations around the world have come to adopt (or adapt)--the definition: the sum of all interactions, based on an organization's culture, that influence patient perceptions across the continuum of care.

In exploring each element--interactions, culture, perceptions and across the continuum--it remains clear that experience is delivered at the numerous touch points, it's built on the types of organizations we choose to be and it must actively engage patients and family members as partners on the journey. This leads us back to the question, how do we start the process of creating a definition for our organization?

>> Read the full commentary at Hospital Impact