Roadmap to Excellence every patient every coworker great quality practical approach every engaging approach individuals self-sustaining self-initiating empowering values co-worker great experience verytime equipping experience behaviors self-correcting every patient time health common sense healthcare improvement strategies Pat i ent Sat isf ac t ion Improving the Patient Experience www.mtchealth.com 2012 Management and Technology Consultants, LLC
MTC s Roadmap to Excellence What does a physician do when the patient satisfaction survey results show low scores? How can operations improve their front office scores? How can an organization build patient loyalty? Since 1998 MTC has delivered perhaps the most accurate, precise, credible and cost-effective patient satisfaction survey. Now MTC offers training to physicians, employees and organizational leaders that can make every patient interaction an excellent experience every time. MTC s Roadmap to Excellence is a tool to help simplify the process of hardwiring in every office the attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviors that build a culture of patient-centered excellence. MTC delivers outstanding Web-based content for use by physicians and office staff in 30 minute interactive training sessions at each doctor s office. system includes modular training, discussion, a focus on specific ways to apply the principles and tracking the results. How helpful would it be to have your priority of building a culture of excellence reinforced in practical ways every week and every month at every office? MTC s Roadmap to Excellence grows employee understanding and personal commitment to making each office a great place to work, a great place to practice medicine and a great place for patients to be treated. Every time. Sample Roadmap to Excellence Training Modules Engaging Employees Series What Is In It for Me? Equipping for Excellence: The Five Patient Senses Series Caring Listening Understanding Responding Will It Work? Equipping for Excellence: Common Sense Communication First Impressions Telephone Etiquette Email Etiquette Empowering for Excellence: Creating Service Excellence Teams Self-Initiating/Self-Sustaining Excellence: Values Based Improvement Strategies Contact MTC at Consulting@MTCHealth.com for more information or for non-mtc survey client pricing. Use MTC s Roadmap to Excellence to solve the problems of delivering consistent training and set up your healthcare teams to deliver excellent patient experiences for every patient and coworker every time.
Engage, Equip and Empower Every Employee to Create a Great Experience For Every Patient and Coworker Every Time Point of View: Excellence in the patient s perception of their experience depends on competent service and a positive personal connection. MTC s Roadmap to Excellence is a tool for each office and department to use to become more accountable, engaged, equipped and empowered to improve the quality of every patient and coworker experience every time. 1. Quality needs to be an all the time/every time focus 2. We do what is important to us and tend to ignore what is not important to us 3. What is important to me describes my values 4. Changing behaviors should be a stepping stone to changing values 5. Changing values depends on individuals: 1. Seeing the need, 2. Believing the change is desirable and/or necessary, 3. Deciding that something else is now more important to them 6. A culture of quality is rooted in healthy values and needs to become 1. Self-initiating 2. Self-sustaining 3. Self-perpetuating 4. Self-correcting 7. A successful culture of quality depends on each employee becoming: 1. Engaged (taking personal responsibility for change) 2. Equipped (training and education) 3. Empowered (personal or practice/department level decision making) 4. Accountable (feeling personally responsible for results) 8. delivers: 1. An integrated approach that engages employees at all levels and increases employee buy in to the concept of creating a quality experience for patients and coworkers. 2. Empowering strategies that enable each office and provider to accept the responsibility to improve the quality of the patient and coworker experience; 3. Tools to equip employees with knowledge, methods and processes to improve the quality experience 4. Content to consistently communicate and reinforce the values that drive quality oriented behaviors; 5. Management tools that support continuous quality improvement through corrective action plans and iterative improvement strategies; shifts the opportunity and responsibility for improvement to every point of customer service. Every office location, department and office becomes accountable for quality and engages, equips and empowers every employee and every office to make this, as Quint Studer so eloquently states, a great place to work, a great place to practice medicine and a great place for patients to be treated. Page 1
Differences Between Ambulatory Care and Inpatient Services Quality Initiatives In a hospital setting departments are typically in a campus setting with larger concentrations of employees that afford comparatively easier physical access and management. Historically, the inpatient quality improvement process was top down with a representative group of administrative, operations, clinical and front office stakeholders selected to form a centralized service excellence committee or team. They would research the issues identified in surveys or anecdotal experiences, research best practices to implement, create a program with a catchy acronym, announce and roll out the program and attempt to persuade everyone to implement it. Managers have access to employees to monitor performance, and compliance is easier to see by simply rounding on departments and nursing stations. Frequently, quality improvement programs in ambulatory care have adopted this centralized approach. A case in point: One MTC client asked us to help them with the lack of cooperation and buy in to customer service quality initiatives in their 175 provider, multi-specialty, multi-location medical practice. They had used the top down approach and created a centralized Service Excellence Team with representatives were selected from administrators, operations, clinicians and the front office, reviewed their quality issues, selected some on which to focus, researched the best practices, designed a program After 12 months, only one provider was still following the program. She was the physician who was chair of the service excellence team. The problem was not with the issues identified or the suggested behaviors and processes. Their problem was that a prepackaged solution did not respect the differences in how offices function in a hospital compared with ambulatory care. Their attempt to make it easier for the providers and front office staff actually sabotaged what would have created buy in and ownership by each office of the solutions and the implementation of those solutions. By contrast, during the same time frame, the same medical group needed to standardize clinical protocols as a part of qualifying for their Patient Centered Medical Home certification. A very different approach was used. Their chief medical officer told me he published the minimum HEDIS standards and asked each specialty to wrestle with what internal standards they would use and how to document compliance in their EMR. Twelve months later, they had 95% compliance. What was the difference? Their customer service approach was top down and did not create for the employees the very processes that create engagement, equipping and empowering. In an attempt to simplify the steps, create a corporate-wide solution and save every office time, the unintended consequence was sabotaging the ultimate success of the program. Because they short circuited the engaging, equipping and empowering process at the individual office level, they robbed the providers and front office staff of the opportunity to create the sense of personal ownership and buy in of the solutions necessary to implement change. Page 2
uses a very different approach from the traditional top down model. Rather, it mirrors the organic approach, exemplified by the chief medical officer in implementing new clinical standards placing the opportunity and responsibility for change at each point of service. By adding the focus at each point of service, the Roadmap to Excellence recognizes the natural strengths of the distributed management as it engages, equips and empowers every employee in the process of quality improvement. Developed from hard experience and after an extensive review of current literature on quality improvement, the content of the Roadmap to Excellence reflects the common sense values, behaviors and strategies widely recognized to create a great patient and coworker experience. is a model of how management can respect the distributed nature of ambulatory care and still keep everyone on the same page when it comes to creating a great experience for every patient and every coworker every time. How the Roadmap to Excellence Engages, Equips and Empowers Employees: With the Roadmap to Excellence, the clinicians and front office staff join together in regular meetings on the subject of improving the patient - and coworker - experience. Meetings are suggested to be 30 minutes long, and we recommend them to be done several times a month, up to weekly. Some MTC clients plan them over a lunch time. Each meeting has a short and thought provoking Web-based presentation typically lasting between 6 and 12 minutes. After the presentation, there are Starter Questions to facilitate discussion about the topic, what might apply to their office and if there are specific actions that should be taken by individuals or processes tweaked in their office to improve the patient and coworker experience. When appropriate, an simple action plan is created and then the status of previous action plans are reviewed. Within the corporate policies, standards and values each office is empowered to discuss, wrestle with solutions and implement their decisions that impact the quality of the patient and coworker experience. Clinicians and front office staff are involved in every step of the process (engaged) Clinicians and front office staff receive training and share their own experiences (equipped) Clinicians and front office staff make decisions, report on progress and track the results of their decisions (empowered) This is very different from a top-down, centralized solution and respects the differences that exist in ambulatory care. With the Roadmap to Excellence, every office deals with their unique set of challenges but hears the same healthy corporate values and stays on the same page with their executive leadership. Page 3
Roadmap to Excellence Topics: What s In It for Me? 4 Sessions This series asks frank questions about the benefit of improving the quality of the patient and coworker experience from the perspective of an employee, a provider, a patient and the organization as a whole. We do what is important to us and tend to leave undone what is not important. We believe people need to ask - and answer - why creating a great patient and coworker experience is important to them. What's In It For Me? Session 1: Employees 07:37 Session 2: Providers 12:03 Session 3: Patients 07:37 Session 4: Organizations 08:28 Values Based Improvement Strategies 5 Sessions Memorizing lists of behaviors, phrases and keywords can be valuable to reduce the number of catastrophic errors that can occur in patient interactions. We couple behavioral education with understanding how healthy corporate values benefit the employee, the patient and the organization. Understanding the role values play in our behaviors, how unhealthy values create unproductive office drama and how to achieve long-lasting change in behavior are essential to creating and sustaining a culture of quality. Values Based Improvement Session 1: Why Doesn't Change Last? 09:50 Session 2: What Is Important to Me? 09:03 Session 3: What If I Don't Want to Change? 05:57 Session 4: How Do We Change Our Values? 07:37 Session 5: Making the Commitment to Change 09:18 The 5 Patient Senses 8 Sessions Patients have a clear sense of what makes for a great experience for them. In these eight sessions we explore specific behaviors and values that demonstrate to the patient we care, listen, understand, respond and build patient confidence that their relationship and what they are told works. The Five Patient Senses Session 1: Caring 05:18 Session 2: Caring Part 2 11:49 Session 3: Listening 07:00 Session 4: Listening Part 2 07:10 Session 5: Understanding 07:03 Session 6: Responding 05:20 Session 7: Responding Part 2 09:30 Session 8: Will This Work? 11:18 Page 4
Communication Etiquette 3 Sessions We interact with patients and coworkers constantly. While we can decide how we choose to interact with others, we cannot change what are considered culturally appropriate behaviors, or etiquette. Understanding proper etiquette sets patients, coworkers and each of us up for greater success and fewer misunderstandings. These three sessions explore what patients and coworkers expect when we talk with them on the phone, via email and in person. Communication Etiquette Session 1: Phone Etiquette 09:03 Session 2: Email Etiquette 07:48 Session 3: First Impressions 10:10 Setup for Success 5 Sessions An essential element of creating a Service Excellence Team in every office and every department is knowing how to lead and organize the meetings. In the Setup for Success series we give an overview, define the necessary roles and the responsibilities necessary. Included are the forms for attendance and to create corrective action plans where appropriate. Setup for Success Session 1: Overview 04:28 Session 2: Roadmap to Excellence Meetings 08:29 Session 3: Team Roles and Leadership 06:16 Session 4: Role of the Coordinator 03:31 Session 5: The Role of the Facilitator 07:56 Roadmap to Excellence Fees: For 2013, these initial 25 sessions of the Roadmap to Excellence are included, at no additional charge, for providers and their front office staff who are surveyed by MTC. Additional training or consulting is available for a separate fee. Partner with MTC and give your providers and staff the best methods to be accountable for their work, to improve the quality of their work environment and to become engaged, equipped and empowered to make it a great place to work, a great place to practice medicine and a great place for patients to be treated. Page 5