Featured Case Study:
Home Nursing Agency Serves as a Role Model for Satisfaction
(Altoona, Pa.)
Vitals
Home Nursing Agency (HNA) is a provider of home health, hospice, behavioral health and other community health programs in central Pennsylvania.
Challenge
At a strategic planning meeting in 2007, agency leaders looked at patient satisfaction scores and realized more needed to be done from a care-coordination perspective. Patients were reporting that too many different nurses were handling their cases and not enough communication was taking place. With an average daily home health census of 1,400 patients, that was perhaps unsurprising, but the finding exposed a problem to be solved – improve communication and patients’ perception of care.
Solutions
Working with the HHCAHPS InsightsSM and Hospice InsightsSM solutions from the Press Ganey Satisfaction Performance SuiteSM, HNA found that the problem wasn’t really the number of nurses serving a given patient. “It’s about communication and the patient’s perception of how we are handling this episode of care from initial contact onward,” says Celeste Twardon, senior vice president of quality and chief clinical officer for HNA.
Utilizing a decade of Press Ganey patient satisfaction survey data along with Press Ganey Hot Comments®, the agency’s response was an organization-wide Continuity of Care educational program, the core of which was ensuring that patients are aware of the staff’s sensitivity to meeting or even exceeding their needs.
Performance and Outcomes
At the program’s orientation meeting, leaders emphasized what employees needed to know about customer service and service excellence, dealing with interpersonal relations and communication. All employees had the opportunity to share in the success of meeting these goals through a program called Staff Working Together to Achieve Results (STAR). The program had been based on meeting financial goals, but has now been expanded to include customer satisfaction outcomes. In the near future, the agency will look to add a quality metric to the equation.
For the past three years, the goal was to have at least 85% of patient satisfaction survey respondents circle a “5” for “Likelihood to recommend agency services to family and friends” (on a 1-5 scale). This goal was finally met in 2009. The achievement demonstrates a high degree of customer loyalty, as well as the agency’s commitment to its mission of “providing the highest quality of customer service delivered with a sense of warmth, kindness and individual pride.”
Employees clearly took pride in the outcome. Along with high employee satisfaction numbers, the agency — for the sixth consecutive year — was named as a Best Place to Work in Pennsylvania in the large division category. Over the past two years, the agency has also received national recognition from Modern Healthcare as one of the “100 Best Places to Work in Healthcare.”
HNA has found improvement in the nexus of employee and patient satisfaction and quality of care. With the federal government making administration of the Home Health Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey a condition of full reimbursement under Medicare, HNA believes it is ahead of the curve toward improvement.
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