The Intersection of Patient Experience and Safety

As National Director of Patient Experience at Compass One Healthcare and its subsidiary, Crothall Healthcare, Grant Randall knows the importance of patient experience and satisfaction. Factors such as the perception of safety in a healthcare environment create the reality – a hospital can do everything it can to make a patient safe, but customer satisfaction scores will go down if the experience doesn’t match reality.

Randall shared his experiences on some surprising ways that made all the difference in patient satisfaction.

The patient experience became an important consideration for healthcare organizations as value-based purchasing became a reimbursement KPI for hospitals through HCAHPS and patient satisfaction scores. And, beyond the CMS and reimbursement portions, Randall said it’s really about doing the right thing for patients.

“How can we bring them into our hospital and make them comfortable?,” Randall said. “And how can we show them empathy through the great clinical care that we’re giving?”

Safety, and a patient’s perception of safety, isn’t a new concern for healthcare organizations. Still, the pandemic did spotlight the importance of ensuring patients feel the hospital environment is safe.

And, while hospitals may be taking all the right safety precautions and instituting every protocol to protect patients and staff from the coronavirus, seeing is believing. And that is one area where Randall said Crothall Healthcare experienced a sharp rise in patient satisfaction scores.

“We had partnered with Surfacide several years ago with their UV-C technology,” Randall said. “We were using it almost specifically in discharge rooms and all ORs. That was already pretty standard. We started seeing the data come back on the coronavirus, and we said, if we can get this in every single room, let’s get it in every single room.”

One interesting and unintended benefit of utilizing the Surfacide Helios System was the patient reaction. They were fascinated by the units and excited that Crothall took the extra steps to ensure patient safety.

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