Press Ganey regularly generates insightful white papers for hospitals, based on research and trends we’ve uncovered in our extensive database.
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Of Meaningful Use and Hospital Quality
The meaningful use provisions of the HITECH Act are starting to kick into high gear, with financial rewards for adopting electronic health records technology already being paid out – and serious penalties for failing to do so coming in a few years. It isn’t easy to meet the rules of this complex program, but doing nothing is not an option for most hospitals and medical practices. This paper outlines one of the most serious challenges – reporting electronic quality of care measures to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. E-measures look a lot like chart-abstracted measures, but they aren’t the same, and there are specific steps a hospital must take in order to successfully undertake one of the more important aspects of meaningful use. (July 2011)
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The Time to Prepare for Value-based Purchasing is Now
Regulations to implement the Hospital Inpatient Value-based Purchasing Program underscore the urgency of improving performance on measures of clinical quality and patient satisfaction. This analysis of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' final rule highlights the measures and the scoring methodology. Combined with an explanation of Press Ganey’s new Value-based Purchasing Calculator, this paper provides insight into where hospitals should focus limited improvement resources to achieve the biggest improvement in scores. (May 2011)
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Measuring Hospitalist Satisfaction: Designing Survey Questions to Uncover Employment Attitudes of Physicians Specializing in Hospital Medicine
Hospitalists are beset by heavy caseloads, the pressure to improve quality and cut costs, and the need to justify their role to other stakeholders. The potential for abandoning the specialty or burning out is high. This paper describes the results of a collaboration of Press Ganey and the Society for Hospital Medicine’s Career Satisfaction Task Force to design and field test a set of custom questions to measure the satisfaction of hospitalist physicians. (January 2011)
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The Link Between Patient Satisfaction and Malpractice Risk
New research on the litigation history of a large, urban medical center builds on the prior evidence of a close correlation between patient satisfaction and the risk of being sued for malpractice. It shows that knowing how patients rate their physicians based on the criteria of "minimum satisfaction," or the lowest satisfaction score they receive, can be helpful in predicting the risk for being named in a patient’s lawsuit. This study also suggests tools for building closer relationships with patients to avoid future litigation. (February 2010)
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The Many Returns of Employee Partnership: How an Engaged and Satisfied Workforce Leads to Improved Retention and Outcomes
Rather than focusing on a single aspect of traditional measurement (employee satisfaction), new research has suggested that organizations using the dimensional Employee Partnership model to identify and increase the volume of dedicated employees benefit from improved results on retention, clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction and an overall return on investment. (November 2009)
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Safety Culture and the Disconnect Between Front-line Staff and Administrators
In an era when patient safety has become front-page news and the health care industry is striving to incorporate safer patient-care practices, one of the most difficult barriers to overcome is the disconnect among staff on the perceptions of patient safety within organizations. New technologies and procedural implementation have emerged to address and reduce errors, but these efforts require support from the top down to be successful. When staff members have differing views of patient safety, consensus on how to combat errors cannot be reached, and improvement efforts cannot be fully implemented. (October 2008)
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Physician Partnership: Creating Powerful Relationships
The most successful hospital leaders seize every opportunity to improve their relationship with the medical staff. In addition to business ties, administrators seek a social contract built on a foundation of mutual dependence and shared goals. Yet, it has become more challenging to create those relationships with physicians. (September 2008)
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Partnership: The Next Frontier in Employee Relationships
Today's health care workforce couldn't be more different from its predecessors. Rapidly changing demographics and employees' shifting expectations and motivations are producing a perfect storm in recruitment and retention. An already limited pool of highly talented health care workers is about to become a historically tight labor market, as the ravenous baby boom generation starts consuming health care just as it gobbled up every other product and service — in record amounts. (September 2008)
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Why Switch From In-House Surveying to Press Ganey?
Hospitals that partner with Press Ganey experience increased response rates, verified and accurate results, improved satisfaction, an enhanced work environment, and — most importantly — improved service quality. Clients who made the switch say the in-house method was not capturing dissatisfied patients because satisfied patients were the most inclined to send surveys back to the hospitals. (February 2007)