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
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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)