Patients Come Second: Leading Change by Changing the Way You Lead

The longer you wait to make the decision, the more likely it becomes that the disease will spread. That means you have to act as quickly as possible when you know you have a problem child in the house. And that’s what makes it hard sometimes, because you’re not dealing with a department or something that’s widespread. It’s just one person. And if t

We’ve been able to be highly competitive in the patient experience despite the fact that we don’t have all private rooms and we don’t have a million-dollar view, because we focus on what patients really care about when they’re here, when they’re vulnerable. They’re not looking out the window. What they care about is the way they feel, the way you m

definition of patient experience: “the sum of all interactions, shaped by an organization’s culture, that influence patient perception across the continuum of care.”

Dr. David Feinberg, CEO of UCLA Health System, goes above and beyond to make real connections with his people. Every week, he invites random staff members to lunch, so they can share a meal as they share their opinions on their work environment and anything that will improve UCLA’s care of employees, patients, and families. It is part of a broad ef

In the wake of a poor patient experience, that patient will not be coming back the next time he or she gets sick, which means you just lost a valuable long-term customer—and probably the rest of the family, too.

Today, patient experience is a top-three kind of issue, ranking even higher than cost reduction. Yet three-quarters of health care organizations have yet to define what patient experience means to them, let alone set aside money to address it. The more progressive executives who have tried to tackle the challenge head-on, however, have gone about t

It turns out the wait times weren’t the true issue. Patients expected to wait at the doctor’s office! It was the unknown, and the apparent lack of concern, that drove them crazy.

Consider that the lifetime value of a single patient to a hospital is some $250,000.

By having the discipline to conduct the surveys regularly over time, we can analyze the patterns that emerge, patterns that can either give us reasons to celebrate progress or, on the other hand, to hit the pause button and find out where we’re beginning to go wrong. We can then target the areas where we receive the lowest scores and set about tryi