The patient experience movement moment

Patient Experience Journal The p atient experience movement moment William Lehrman 0 1 2 3 4 0 Part of the Health and Medical Administration Commons, Health Policy Commons, Health Services Administration Commons, and the Health Services Research Commons 1 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services 2 Jason A. Wolf PhD hT e Beryl Institute / Patient Experience Journal 3 Geoffrey Silvera MHA Penn State University 4 William G. Lehrman, PhD, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Follow this and additional works at: https://pxjournal.org/journal - Article 4 Commentary The Patient Experience Movement Moment Introduction For years, the patient experience movement has been gaining momentum. Inspired initially by demands from consumers and advocates to acknowledge, understand and improve patient experience in an increasingly rationalized, segmented, and time-managed medical system. Then government policy contributed to the movement by mandating collection of data using scientifically developed and rigorously standardized surveys, publicly reporting provider performance, and ultimately linking a small but symbolically potent bit of payment to this new metric. Healthcare organizations, after initial reluctance and sometimes opposition, came to accept the challenges of patient engagement by modifying processes, structures and attitudes. The movement has been augmented by both an expanding research literature that generally demonstrates positive correlation between patient experience and clinical, safety, readmission, and outcome measures, and a burgeoning industry of patient experience experts who develop and disseminate techniques, practices and training. Awareness of patient experience and the imperative for patient engagement now seem pervasive in hospitals and other healthcare settings across the continuum of care -from board rooms to bedside. The vocabulary of the movement, even its once arcane acronyms, now needs little explanation. Patient experience has become a common element in hospital ratings, rankings, and marketing materials. Every month brings the publication of media articles, scientific research, opinion and commentary about provider quality. These trends and what they portend lead us to conclude that the patient experience movement moment has arrived. The original impetus for exploring and addressing patient experience is the intrinsic dignity and value of the patient - coupled with the probability that we or someone we love may have an extended encounter with the healthcare system at some point. Healthcare redesign has increased patients’ share of healthcare costs, leading to consumer activation and a small but growing cohort attuned and comfortable with comparing and choosing providers. The experiences of patients now serve as a metric for industry competition and differentiation. Healthcare providers have become more responsive to consumer awareness and engagement, gathering rapid patient feedback using internal surveys, polishing their public image and touting patient evaluations of their healthcare delivery services. Government entities, especially in the USA, have played a seminal role in establishing patient experience as central to quality of care on uniform and national basis. The relationship between patients’ perceptions of their healthcare experience and the quality of the healthcare services they received has not always been acknowledged. The Patient Experience Journal (PXJ) and others are making concerted efforts to compile and disseminate new knowledge on the patient experience. Here we present an abbreviated overview of major factors that have helped move patient experience to the center of discussions of provider quality. There is an emerging consensus that the patient experience is a fundamental aspect of provider quality, one that complements established clinical process and outcome measures but is neither subsumed nor secondary to them. Patient experience is a multi-faceted concept and the nature of its relationship to other quality metrics is complex. While debate continues, a growing number of empirical studies have found a positive relationship between patient experience and other facets of provider quality1, 2. As well as being measurable, patient experience of care is specific, actionable and improvable. The advancement of the patient experience concept is linked to a number of mutually reinforcing trends: creation and implementation of standardized surveys; mandatory provider participation in such programs; obligatory public reporting of survey results and their inclusion in pay-forperformance models; healthcare cost burden shifting to consumers; direct marketing by image-conscious providers; and expansion of an industry that devises and sells quality improvement products and services to providers. As these forces coalesce, the measurement, analysis and improvement of the patient’s experience of care is ever more prominent across the healthcare spectrum: in hospita (...truncated)