New England Baptist Hospital - Boston, Massachusetts
Summit Award Winner: Inpatient
New England Baptist Hospital is an urban, not-for-profit facility located in Boston, Massachusetts. The hospital currently has 118 licensed beds with 7,155 inpatient visits and 132,783 outpatient visits annually.
Area of Focus
After a period of corporate restructuring in the early 2000s, New England Baptist Hospital began looking for ways to realign its staff with its core values of respect, ownership, superior service, and excellence.
Actionable Steps
In September 2005, the hospital implemented a Legendary Service program based on the Ritz Carlton model. A hospital-wide orientation was held and employees were empowered to resolve problems on the spot through a service recovery program. The program included service standards, which reinforce professional attitudes towards telephone etiquette, patient interactions, and problem resolution. A more formal standard of dress was adopted. Physician office staff were included in the training, and physician department chairs and vice presidents were keyed into the program to follow up as needed. The orientation was reinforced by daily departmental education sessions.
The Legendary Service program was backed up by overall structural adjustments. A full-time patient relations specialist was hired to resolve complaints that could not be handled immediately by the staff. A director, who was also a nurse, was appointed to manage construction projects, assessing the impact on patient care and mitigating the impact on patients and their families.
Through Legendary Service, the hospital has been able to undertake projects that would ordinarily be stressful to the system and reduce patient satisfaction. For example, a room service program was implemented without a decline in scores. Multiple construction and renovation projects were started during the same period, also without a decline in scores. In addition, the hospital has been able to maintain its scores while taking on more complex orthopedic cases than any other hospital in the state. Legendary Service is more than a program, it is a shift in overall philosophy that employees live and breathe.
ROI
The position was further defined when the hospital was identified in spring 2008 as the top-performing hospital in Massachusetts on HCAHPS.
Clinical outcomes have also improved. As reported on a Clinical Dashboard, the infection rates have remained less than a third of the national average and falls are less than half the nationally-established benchmark.
Since implementing the Legendary Service and service recovery programs in fall 2005, the hospital has experienced consistent improvements in its Press Ganey rankings. The hospital ranked in the 94th percentile nationally and 80th percentile locally during the 1st Quarter 2004. Since fall 2005, the hospital has remained at the 99th percentile locally and has scored in the 99th percentile for eight quarters.