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May 7, 2008

Six Rural Maryland Hospitals Will Use Electronic System To Remotely Monitor ICU Patients From Delaware

Six rural Maryland hospitals facing shortages of emergency department physicians will use an electronic monitoring system provided by Christiana Care Health System in Wilmington, Del., to remotely monitor intensive care patients, the Washington Post reports. More »

Management: Easing In

The beginning of Donna King’s story may sound familiar to hospital executives: she describes nursing staff retention rates as abysmal. “It was a constant revolving door,” she said. More »

May 6-12, 2008 is National Nurses Week

National Nurses Week is observed during the second week of May, beginning on National Nurses Day (May 6) and concluding on Florence Nightingale’s birthday (May 12). More »

Authoritative Report on Home Care Experiences Released by
Press Ganey

 On May 1, Press Ganey released its 2008 Home Care Pulse Report: Patient Perspectives on American Health Care. The report shows a continued upward trend in patient satisfaction, high ratings for attending nurses, and lower ratings for administrative tasks such as billing and scheduling.

Register now for Press Ganey's 2008 Regional Workshops

Registration is now open for 2008 Press Ganey Regional Workshops! Online registration, meeting locations, sessions, and hotel accommodations can be found on our website.

Save the Date—2008 National Client Conference

Press Ganey's 2008 National Client Conference will be held in Grapevine, TX on November 17-19. Book your hotel reservations now! Visit our website for information on registration fees and hotel accommodations.

Solution Short: Ease of Getting an Appointment

In each issue of Briefings, we provide a sneak peak into our Solutions Starters. Solution Starters are developed for the standard questions on many of our survey products and include a definition of the question, voice of the customer, and a list of improvement tips. These tips are designed to help jump start your improvement planning. Below is just a sample of the many improvement tips Press Ganey offers through Solutions Starters. The full series of Solutions Starters is available to clients. In this issue, we feature solutions for the "Ease of Getting an Appointment" from the outpatient behavioral health patient satisfaction survey.

We recommend you distribute these tips to those responsible for instituting improvements as a way to stimulate ideas and discussion. Press Ganey is proud to partner with you as you work to improve the quality of health care.

This item measures the client’s perception of the ease of scheduling an appointment. This seemingly simple act involves a series of experiences that cumulatively create an overall perception of how easy it was to obtain the appointment, including: the phone system, phone personnel, availability of appointment times, convenience of operating hours, and the amount of coordinating the client has to do on his/her own. For mental health practices, the availability of appointments is crucial to satisfaction. The value clients place on their relationship with their mental health care providers and the sense of urgency sometimes felt when needing an appointment combine to make this an important issue for clients.

• Analyze your process from the client’s perspective and identify and reduce or eliminate bottlenecks.
• Have phone scripting available to ensure consistency and adherence to high standards.
• Consider offering clients the ability to schedule appointments via the Internet. This grants clients the convenience of scheduling their appointment whenever they like (instead of only during business hours) and lessens the time the staff need to spend manning phone calls.
• Conduct a time audit. Discover if there are any patterns as to when you are the busiest, when you receive the most clients, appointment requests, emergencies, etc. This will allow you to schedule more efficiently and staff accordingly. This data may be readily available through your information systems or you may need staff to track and record the data manually for two weeks.
• Review your scheduling information technology systems together with your front-line staff who use the system every day, and have an open discussion. Is the system user-friendly, efficient, and does it meet your needs? Or is it a complex system of redundancies and paperwork?
• Schedule reminder phone calls for the day before the client’s appointment to lessen no-shows

Forum Highlights

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Discharge Phone Calls
Can anyone who provides 80-100% discharge phone calls to patients tell me how they do it. I am very interested in starting this process and would like more information. We still do the follow-up phone calls, but I would like to connect with the patient after discharge. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Scripting Responses to Complaints of ER Waits
Patient reps who visit patients on the inpatient units often hear many complaints about our patients' ER experiences (we are seeing unprecedented volume in our ER and regularly have patients boarding in the ER ... sometimes as many as 30 boarders at one time.) We want to give these patient reps some guidelines about how to respond when they hear these complaints. Any ideas? Does anyone have scripting for this?

Requirement 13a of 2008 National Patient Safety Goals
 I am a Quality Review Specialist. I handle patient satisfaction issues for our facility. I am also on the Rapid Response Committee. At our last meeting, I was tasked with the responsibility of figuring out how to help our facility comply with the new JCAHO requirement 13A of the 2008 National Patient Safety Goals (Define and communicate the means for patients and their families to report concerns about safety and encourage them to do so), specifically to involve and encourage patients and family members to activate the Rapid Response Team. Do any of you have a Rapid Response Team? If you do, how did you educate your patients and family to use it, if necessary? Right now, our Rapid Response Team is only activated by staff. We have a Speak Up Patient Hotline number sticker on each patient phone, but the line goes directly to me (or the operator after hours), and is specifically for complaints, not to activate the RRT. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

From the Satisfaction Monitor

The Satisfaction Monitor, Press Ganey’s bi-monthly client magazine, features best practices on patient, physician, and employee satisfaction, and safety culture as well as first-person customer success stories. If you do not currently receive the Satisfaction Monitor, contact your Consultant.

Parkridge Surgery Center—Transforming an Organization...One Step at at Time
Parkridge Surgery Center was started in November 2003 as a joint venture with Palmetto Health, South Carolina's largest nonprofit health care system. We are a freestanding, multi-specialty ambulatory surgery center handling roughly 3,000 cases per year. Read full article.