Return to Main Menu

Currents To Medical Center Employees: Approximately six months ago a decision was reached to select a new patient satisfaction survey tool and implementation is now underway.  A series of presentations have recently been conducted to educate managers and others on the new tool. The new survey tool promises to be much more useful to us by providing objective information “through the eyes of the patients.” It will provide very timely information and will enable us to pinpoint problems. Several years ago the Medical Center embraced patient satisfaction as an organizational priority. This led to the development of our customer service policy (see Medical Center policy A-72);  revision of our combined job descriptions/performance appraisals to include customer service as a key component; implementation of the customer service training program; and creation of the Patient and Family Liaison Program.  The new survey tool is another example of our continuing efforts to underscore patient satisfaction as an organizational priority. Highlights of a recent presentation to prepare for the “roll out” of the new patient satisfaction survey tool are provided below in this newsletter. Thank you very much. W. Stuart Smith Vice President for Clinical Operations and Executive Director, MUSC Medical Center   Survey tool to improve patient experience A new survey tool to measure and improve the patient experience in MUSC’s hospital promises to give administrators and department managers an almost real-time view of how well the Medical Center measures up to both patient expectations and to other hospitals across the country. The survey was presented at the weekly hospital communications meeting Tuesday by The NRC+Picker Group representative Kevin Horne, who explained how the survey is taken, what it is designed to show and what steps can be taken to identify opportunities to improve. Introducing Horne, director of quality Rosemary Ellis told those gathered that six months ago the Medical Center decided to switch survey instruments in order to be prepared for the CMS (Center for Medicare Services) Hospital-CAHPS (Consumer Assessment of Health Plans) effort. In the future the federal government intends to require hospitals to measure the patient’s experience of care with the results being publicly displayed on the CMS Web site. “Switching to the new tool will give us specific information in order to make improvements.”  Access to the on-campus Web site will be made available, with user names and passwords within the month, she said. “One thing we were asked to provide,” Horne said, “was not that MUSC is among the, say, 90 percent of hospitals with the most satisfied patients. What we were asked to show is where steps need to be taken to improve the patient experience. “So in this case low numbers are best.” Further explaining the difference, Horne said that the NCR+Picker perspective looks for what is important to patients, not what is important to managers. It focuses eight specific dimensions of care, not operations; measures patient experience, not satisfaction; assesses behaviors, not attitudes; and lists responses in terms of reporting, not rating scales. Research into the dimensions of care, which are factors in an overall evaluation of care, found the following categories: family and friends, patients’ preferences, coordination of care, information and education, continuity and transition, physical comfort, emotional support and access to care. Patient satisfaction surveys, Horne said, tend to yield high satisfaction rates, but provide little information on comparisons among hospitals. Patient experiences tend to uncover patients’ concerns about their hospital stay, which can be of value to the hospitals in quality improvement efforts and to consumers for hospital selection. By posting survey results online, Horne said, this new survey tool will show where improvements need to be made, it will show how MUSC measures up nationally and locally, and will even relay transcribed comments from survey responders regarding their experiences as patients. While some may question the comparison of MUSC’s academic medical center with other hospitals that may have a different patient population and lack the additional mission of training doctors, Horne said that it is important to keep in mind that differences aside, these are still the hospitals we compete with for patients.  What influences a patient to choose a hospital is not just the level of medical care, but the way the patient and the patient’s family is treated. Children’s Hospital administrator John Sanders related a recent conversation in which he spoke with a family whose child died in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. The family had nothing but praise for MUSC, because of the way they were treated by MUSC nurses and doctors.   Catalyst Online is published weekly, updated as needed and improved from time to time by the MUSC Office of Public Relations for the faculty, employees and students of the Medical University of South Carolina. Catalyst Online editor, Kim Draughn, can be reached at 792-4107 or by email, catalyst@musc.edu. Editorial copy can be submitted to Catalyst Online and to The Catalyst in print by fax, 792-6723, or by email to petersnd@musc.edu or catalyst@musc.edu. To place an ad in The Catalyst hardcopy, call Community Press at 849-1778.