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Health care reform brings with it an alphabet soup of programs aimed at pushing medical group practices to provide more patient-centered care. Acronyms such as PQRI and ACO are now common parlance at health policy gatherings, but for patients – and, indeed, most providers – they are a foreign language. It’s hard to see how they will blend to help a practice meet the overarching goal of providing the best possible outcome and experience for ...

For those of us who study and strive to improve patient satisfaction, it is evident that the degree of satisfaction is heavily influenced by patients’ needs and expectations. Although this has been described by others in great detail, I and some colleagues found a valuable set of data to support that finding in an unlikely place – on the front lines with deployed members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The health services provided and ...

I have had the privilege recently of working with three exceptional organizations that have embraced the philosophy of employee partnership and view it as a key component to becoming high-performing organizations. Each has assessed its employees so that it can address the issues that impact satisfaction as well as work to create an environment that fosters employee engagement. Aspects of employee engagement are highly correlated with overall patient satisfaction. These organizations understand the link between ...

There are so many blogs, articles and papers on how to improve your business performance. Health care executives have a plethora of resources on increasing employee satisfaction, improving the patient experience, reducing medical errors, designing efficient buildings and increasing throughput. But we, as leaders, tend to ignore the glue that holds all these initiatives, ideas and strategies together:

OURSELVES!

All too often, leaders put in countless hours of work sitting in their office, in the ...

When I served as CEO of a hospital, allowing employees to be involved in decision-making was usually about as easy as plugging that oil leak off the Louisiana coast. Why? For almost 20 years, I was part of leadership teams moving at warp speed. We weren’t trained in grad school to seek input from staff in decisions. The pressure on us was intense to achieve a positive bottom line, provide quality care, improve patient satisfaction ...