Measure alignment ensures satisfaction
Measure alignment ensures satisfaction
When it comes to patient satisfaction, are you measuring things right or are you measuring the right things? If you don't focus your efforts on the same things that your patients expect of you, then you could be wasting money, says Gary M. Tomcik, MHA, a partner with Odyssey Partners, a health care management firm in Atlanta.
"What are your patients really evaluating when they rate broad terms like 'cleanliness of room' or 'courtesy demonstrated by nursing staff?' What exactly does excellent mean? Chances are that it means something different to the patient than it means to you or me," he says.
Without aligning your internal measures and processes to reflect the expectations of your patients, your satisfaction scores may look like a roller coaster - sometimes up and sometimes down, he adds. "Measure alignment allows you to get a handle on the reasons behind the fluctuations and successfully correlate changes with future results," he says.
The concept of measure alignment was initially developed at Integrated Measurement System in Atlanta and is used by companies such as UPS, BellSouth, and FedEx, he notes. Odyssey Partners applied this concept to the health care field.
Here's how it works:
First, analyze scores from your external measurement tool. "To identify your strengths and weakness, run a statistical analysis that reflects the highest opportunities for improvement," he says.
Next, analyze internal measures against your external measurement criteria. For example, if you need to improve on room cleanliness, you'll want to examine the inspection criteria and how often the environmental services department does room inspections. you take those internal measures and match them up to the customer requirements, most of the time you will find you are only measuring a small component or piece of the process as seen thorough your eyes rather than from the patient's perspective," he says.
Once you've prioritized the area for improvement, the next step is to review and analyze any written comments, positive and negative, from previous surveys.
"Categorizing them acts like a filter and you begin to see about 10 to 20 patterns," he says.
Based on these categories, Tomcik develops a questionnaire and interviews patients to find out exactly what criteria they consider constitutes an excellent rating for each category. "We begin to look for patterns around patient responses," he adds.
For example, a hospital that had prided itself on an outstanding internal cleanliness score of 93% was only scoring a marginal 80% on its external patient satisfaction tool.
"We found that environmental services staff was looking at different things than the patient," Tomcik says. "Patients wanted the blinds to be operational, items to be located within their reach, trash be taken out in a timely manner, and clutter to be removed from tables."
Staff ensure standards in patients' rooms
Rather than leaving room comfort and cleanliness to chance, Tomcik suggested placing an abbreviated checklist somewhere in the patients' rooms.
"Instead of relying on random monitoring by the environmental services department, a member of the nursing staff can augment this process by monitoring the condition of the patient rooms. The staff ensure that the listed items are up to standard or they notify someone else to correct the deficiencies," he explains. (See partial list on p. 119.)
The bottom line of measure alignment is to understand what your patients expect of you and link together the people and processes to meet those expectations, he stresses.
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