Health and Care in a Capitalist Economy: Understanding Your Maturity

Any successful business can only be sustained by the continuous “win-win” outcome of the provider-consumer interaction. The health and care marketplace is the litmus test that determines not only success, survival, and advancement, but also discrepancies in the win-win balance that can deteriorate the relationship and portend for failure. This is particularly true in an era where the patient (customer) experience is growing in importance in hospitals, general practices and allied health providers. Consumer-directed care is also embedded in the funding structures for the aged care sector as well as the National Disability Insurance scheme (NDIS).

Such discrepancies can be due to:

  • the experience the consumer has,
  • his/her emotional judgment based on that experience,
  • provider engagement to identify or ignore gaps in person-centered care and implement or disregard remedies,
  • whether there is execution of such remedies in service recovery, quality improvement and policy change
  • the culture of quality or service excellence (or the lack thereof) that results in an evolution (or not) of consumer-centered maturity.

 

Evolution is a maturation into any department or organisation’s vision and mission statement, while the status quo is the path to failure.

Separating the trees for the forest – Measuring What Matters

With so much at stake, many organisations struggle to know what to measure and as well as how to measure what matters. Many are undertaking customer, patient or client survey, with a wealth of data and information fed back through manual or digital channels. Whilst drowing in data, many managers are starving of wisdom; with measurement systems in place, the challenge then becomes knowing HOW to improve the consumer experience.

 

The answer lies in an individual, department or organisation’s capabilities for improvement. There is a need to develop audits and tools to identify capabilities for improvement and potential pitfalls in the win-win formula. At Energesse, we have spent the last 7 years developing a scientific methodology, underpinned by an emerging algorithm that leverages six categories (each an “e”):

E1 – Experience

E2 – Emotions

E3 – Engagement

E4 – Execution

E5 – Excellence

E6 – Evolution

 

While this ‘6e’ categorisation may seem as if it were plucked out of life intuitively, it actually has been developed from forensic outcome analyses that best identify gaps in the provider/consumer interaction and best predict their respective remedies. It has the potential to become a ‘gold standard’ methodology for health & care experience improvement, similar to how 6sigma/ lean methodology has become applied to process improvement.

 

Data accrued via systematic surveys, from all levels in the provider/consumer experience, encompass all of the disparate parameters at work in any complex interaction of care. The tangled web of interactions vs misconnections at patient, provider and organizational level and the arithmetic of synergy vs crossed paths are thus combed and preened.  This so that a meaningful input of qualities and quantities of targeted capabilities can be used to construct tangible results that are addressable. Hospitals, practices, aged care homes and disability care centres have significant resource constraints and can’t do everything. Focus and targeting is the key to successful improvements, particularly at the front-line of care, where it matters most.

 

The many facets of a dynamic, however, can become daunting without perspective. If trouble brewing from a multifactorial dysfunction (e.g. uncompassionate leadership, misguided policy, poor environment) is threatening a down spiral, where does the fix start? If a provider entity is successful, how does one maintain this to prevent the seeds of dysfunction?

 

Distinguishing the forest for the trees – What Matters Most to YOU

To understand which capabilities matters most to your department, clinic, hospital or center, data from our PXme evaluations are inserted into the Energesse tool to produce a result that can be displayed visually as a snapshot of the general health of the patient experience capabilities and gaps. Any win-win relationship is a partnership, and the data from our surveys canvasses a sample of stakeholders delivering the experience, from administrators to providers to consumer representatives. As such, all members of the “partnership” contribute.

 

The resulting graphic presentation—the Energesse Patient Experience Maturity Map

—depicts an instantly informative gestalt of the health of the provider/client partnership, which internal capabilties are strongest, and which need the most attention.

 

The architecture behind the Maturity Map graphic is based on the Energesse Patient Experience Maturity Model, which is a scoring system determined by comprehensive explorations into the provider/client partnership; that is, identifying the specific patient population or populations (target), wards, healthcare facility, or even community where improvement is needed in the experience of care:

One “e” at a time

While e1 = Experience is the first priority in terms of developing your experience measurement capability, each “e” is essential. As such, the above presents an excerpt of the Model only. In subsequent editions each of the 6 e’s will be explored while keeping the motif of the multifactorial whole of a health & care organization always in perspective when it comes to experience improvement.

Such is the value of Patient Experience Maturity Evaluation (PXme) as a starting point and an accelerator towards a more person-centered industry.

To learn more about the PXme, contact my team at info@energesse.com. We’d love to hear from you.

 

 

Our 12 Months to Christmas

This holiday season, we have been looking back at how the years’ events have shaped Energesse and how we help our clients. There’s gratitude in everything we do, and we would like to recap our 12 months to Christmas!

January: We presented our inaugural Energesse Patient Experience (PX) Awards to two well-deserving clients – Western Sydney LHD (WSLHD) in Australia and Bagan Specialist Centre in Malaysia. They achieved significant wins in progressing their organisation’s measurement and improvement capabilities, see here.

February: We helped deploy the MES real-time patient feedback and survey platform at South Western Sydney LHD (SWSLHD) who gained strong traction across their hospitals including Liverpool, Bankstown Lidcombe, Bowral & District, Camden, Campbelltown, and the Oral Health Clinic. Find out more about their story here.

March: We celebrated when the Energesse-WSLHD partnership was as a Finalist for the Best Digital Transformation Project Award at the 2018 Australian Healthcare Week Excellence Awards! We continue to work with WSLHD in their patient experience efforts. We also helped Eastern Melbourne PHN (EMPHN), via their CEO Robin Whyte, her Board and executive with the further development of their Strategy and Performance framework. Our process to do this has now gained interest from other PHNs. 

April: I was honoured to be invited to be the Keynote Speaker at the Australian Telehealth Conference organised by the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) – the recording of the keynote can be viewed here. I also delivered a patient experience workshop at the PXSymposia organised by NSW Health.

May: I had the opportunity to speak about how the research sector could improve Consumer Engagement at the Research Australia Speaker Series. It was great to be part of the panel with Jean-Frederic Levesque from the Agency of Clinical Innovation. Attendees came from across the Australian research landscape and were supported by the Garvan Institute and Vodafone Foundation. Great job to CEO Nadia Levin and her team for organising it.  Click here for more info.

June: I had the pleasure of interviewing Martin Bowles, CEO of Calvary Health as part of the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) Health Leaders Roundtable podcast. A few weeks later I was invited to deliver the education keynote on Strategy and Performance Optimisation to health financial leaders i.e. CFO’s and financial managers, to help them play a bigger role in strategic decisions.

We also completed the process of becoming a member of the Apple Consultant Network (ACN). We are looking forward to evolving the relationship with Apple Health and helping use Apple products to improve experiences in hospitals and other healthcare organisations in 2019.

July: We held our inaugural Patient Experience Roundtable in partnership with The Beryl Institute and WSLHD. The Roundtable helped leaders and patient experience champions understand how to make a greater impact in the patient experience movement, share learnings and network. It was great to have the President of the Beryl Institute, Jason Wolf as speaker – this was the first PX Roundtable outside of Australia! CEO of WSLHD, Danny O’Connor also delivered the opening speech on how to engage leaders in patient-centered care. Find out more here. 

We love teaching and education, so July marked the start of our hugely popular free online Energesse Master class series. We covered a range of topics on patient-centered care to help managers and clinicians on patient experience improvement and culture change and increase skills and capability.

August: We were very excited to share our Energesse Patient Experience Maturity Model – a solution aimed at identifying the patient experience maturity level of a healthcare organisation. The solution conducts a gap analysis and capability assessment on person-centered care and identifies ‘what-to-do’ to improve patient experience and progress on the maturity spectrum. It also has matrices for ‘how to do it’ i.e. actions, solutions to improve PX-centered capabilities. We are thrilled about our first use-case to a major hospital in Victoria. If you feel the PX Mate might speak directly to your pain points, just call or email us to find out more.

September: I was grateful for the opportunity to help patients with hearing difficulties as we ran an online training event on ‘Client-Centered Care’ with Australian Hearing. It was a great opportunity to share our learnings with a new segment of health professionals, clinicians and managers. 

October: We continued to expand our presence in championing patient experience movement through partnerships in IHF Brisbane and the IHI-BMJ Conference in Melbourne. We are proud to continue supporting these leading events.

November: We were at the Healthshare Expo. We also collaborated with Avent Edge for the PX Summit in Melbourne. It was also the month we delivered patient experience training to some of the top cardiologists in Malaysia, at the National Heart Institute (IJN) in Malaysia. IJN is the hospital that saved my father’s life when he went through a quadruple bypass and I count this opportunity as one of my top 5 career highlights of all time, as the cardiologist that treated my dad was actually in the training session I delivered there!

December: We were very thankful to have Nick Ryan, CEO of the Australian Aged Care Quality Agency work with us, to share learnings with the aged care sector, as we have been asked to support consumer engagement and experience improvement for aged care organisations in 2019.

Against the backdrop of these highlights, we welcomed more partridges in our pear tree! Two new employees joined us with great impact, Sharon Dayus (former ICU Nurse and eMR implementation analyst from Cambridge Hospitals Trust UK) as our Patient Experience Specialist and Charles Janoras, (Data Science from Phillipines) in our Operations team.

Energesse has had an amazing year -and it is mostly thanks to you, who are out there putting in the hard work to improve the health and wellbeing of peoples’ lives. My team and I are very grateful for your continued effort and support, and we hope for an even greater 2019, making more waves in evolving the patient experience movement!

Outcomes from the Inaugural Australian Patient Experience Roundtable 2018

We recently held our inaugural Energesse-Beryl Institute Patient Experience Roundtable, hosted by Western Sydney Local Health District. It was an exhilarating event, with key speakers (Jason Wolf, President of the Beryl Institute, Dr Avi, CEO of Energesse and Chrissan Segaram and Katherine Maka from WSLHD) and patient experience champions exchanging invaluable ideas and solutions on staff engagement and the patient experience.

Jason Wolf kicked off the event with a global perspective of patient experience and staff engagement efforts – his key message was that patient experience had moved to an unprecedented level of priority where 9 out 10 respondents see it as very to extremely important in their healthcare setting and that patient, family and staff voice is imperative to optimising the patient experience. Based on his global survey, the highest ranked PX components by patients in Australia is listening and communication, courtesy and respect, confidence in staff abilities and taking patients’ pain seriously. If you want to find out more about how you can impact these areas in your organisation through key tools and targeted training, don’t hesitate to talk to us.

I facilitated the session which involved breakout groups on key patient experience challenges such as Staff Engagement, Leadership Engagement and Clinician Burnout. A myriad of ideas and solutions to these challenges were shared.

Translating ideas into action is key as was then demonstrated by WSLHD physiotherapists did through their ‘We’ve Got Your Back’ case study. They improved patient access to specialists based on data gathered through the My Experience Matters survey (on a digital survey platform) and through the introduction of a cost-effective patient-centred service. Their PX scores went from 60-75% on the Kindness, Communication and Involvement in Care domains in September 2017, to 97% across all 3 domains in June 2018!

Overall, the event was definitely a success – we were thrilled with the 8.3/10 rating for the event – there were even a few 10/10s!

If you need advice on HOW to implement patient experience improvements or are keen to participate in future Energesse events and training, do let us know. Just click on the link below to have a conversation with us.

Make an Appointment with Energesse

We will also be following up with some of you in the next few weeks with our summary Patient Experience Roundtable White Paper, aimed at capturing the solutions, opinions and ideas of participants. If you would like to find out more about this White Paper, just call or email us!

Here are some snapshots from the Roundtable!

   
Mr Jason Wolf, President of The Beryl Institute joined us via video conference Mr Danny O’Connor (CEO WSLHD)
   
Roundtable group Roundtable group

 

 

 

 

 

How do we Engage Leaders to Improve the Patient Experience

Like many sectors, health care is going through an enormous shift. New technologies, the expectations of patients across generations, and how to engage a diverse workforce, are just some of the challenges. In terms of looking at those trends and what’s driving change, often when we think about consumers and what they’re looking for from private hospitals, they’re looking for something that’s different. Here I’m interviewing Martin Bowles, CEO of Calvary Healthcare Australia.

In this interview, talk about the top factors in improving that patient experience.

Click on the button to play the podcast.

 

 

  • How the private health care sector can differentiate itself
  • Top three things to improve patient experience
  • The relationship between patient experience and financial outcomes
  • What do Australian hospitals need to change in terms of quality, safety and clinical governance?
  • How to build engagement and get the best out of your team with a diverse workforce
  • The do’s and don’ts for future leaders in healthcare
  • Integrated care opportunities to better align the health system moving forward
  • A vision for the future of healthcare
  • How does having a diverse career shape thinking in healthcare?
  • Martin Bowles’ advice on shaping your career

You can also access the Transcript of this interview here

I’ll be interviewing several other CEO’s for my book on transforming the healthcare experience.

 

Perspectives from the Patient Experience Symposium 2018

Energesse and our partner, Patient Opinion, were the major co-sponsors of the NSW Health symposium again this year. We don’t normally sponsor events but I’m never one to miss supporting our awesome clients, which are Western Sydney Local Health District and South Western Sydney Local Health District, very large health services within NSW Health. I also loved the symposium – a buzzing event full of 600 consumers, experts, clinicians and speakers passionate about the patient experience!

It was a great opportunity to share our learnings in a Workshop called How to Connect with Patients so They ‘Feel Heard’ and Engage staff in Improving Patient Experience. We also connected with a range of healthcare staff, current and future clients and even our competitors – all driven to change the world in our own ways.

If you missed the symposium this year, I’ve captured the hive of activity and some key learnings in my video below. If you were there, you might spot yourself in the background!

The Patient Experience Symposium or any other patient experience event for that matter, is a great way to re-energise and re-motivate yourself in what you’re trying to achieve in improving your service delivery and care experience.
Energesse is an expert at pointing you in the right direction – call or email us if you need any specific assistance with patient experience measurement, implementing quality improvement or if you just need help making a start!

Real-time patient feedback program at Western Sydney LHD nominated for Best Digital Transformation project

The successful implementation of Energesse’s ‘MES Experience’ real-time patient feedback platform at Western Sydney Local Health District earned a nomination as an Award Finalist for Best Digital Transformation project at Australian Healthcare Week.

This achievement comes after the patient survey program at Western Sydney Local Health District known as ‘My Experience Matters’ also won the Chairman’s Award and the Bob Leece Award at the Western Sydney District Quality Awards in 2017. Energesse is now implementing a second district-wide implementation at South Western Sydney Local Health District.

At Western Sydney LHD, the platform has now been rolled out across all major hospitals in the health district including Westmead, Blacktown, Mount Druitt and Auburn Hospitals. Key outcomes have included improved scores in the Friends and Family Test (now at 87%) and The Patient Experience District Wide Score which rose to 86% from 72%. Impactful and visible strategies have also been implemented using more detailed data on the patient experience. For example, an internal ward competition (the Ssshh! Challenge) aimed at reducing night-time noise helped staff improve this score by up to 19%.

The Energesse program has also seen similar accomplishments in the private sector. Genea, the 3rd largest chain of IVF clinics in Australia has seen a 15% improvement in their Net Promoter Score in their first year of implementation across their nationwide chain. The platform provided more granular depth in reporting on patient experience, which empowered front-line staff to make meaningful changes in their own units. The improvements to phone communication and targeted nurse training helped increased satisfaction in a sector with higher consumer expectations.

One of the key success factors for Energesse’ programs is the integrated delivery of a customisable IT platform with expert advisory and training capabilities. Dr Ratnanesan, CEO of Energesse stated “one the major reasons why Energesse has been successful with its IT implementations is its specialist consulting methodology to helps clients achieve outcomes and to continuously innovate on the solution’s user experience. This proprietary formula has helped our clients succeed in a challenging yet important priority in healthcare”.

The MES Experience solution provides real-time data to managers and front-line staff through patient surveys. In addition to quantitative data on patient experience, the platform also comes with a sophisticated PanSensic natural language processing algorithm. This AI tool analyses and translate free text into human emotions and automatically theme patient issues and concerns.  Highly useful data analytics on actionable root causes prove to be valuable in informing quality improvement initiatives for the front-line staff and managers. The tool received a High Commendation last week at the prestigious Health Service Journal Partnership Awards in the UK. In the future, the MES Experience platform is offering real-time staff surveys, providing significant synergies and cost savings to hospitals.

 

Jessica Evans, Project Officer in the Patient and Carer Experience Team at Western Sydney LHD will be delivering a presentation on the Western Sydney LHD implementation on 22nd March 4pm at the Australian Healthcare Week conference.

How to Integrate Digital Technology and the Patient Experience

Almost every technology vendor or platform provider in healthcare aims to be patient-centred or use the patient-centred term as a buzzword. Yet how do we really know that a platform is patient centred unless you actually ask a patient?

Patients don’t want technology, they want solutions to their problems. Often, I have found that in working with many healthcare organisations from hospitals to clinics to insurance companies, it is often assumed that we know what patients and consumers really want in their solutions. Yet, the truth is we often either do not ask the question or we don’t go deep enough into the emotional insights behind the needs and wants of patients. It is time to recognise that there is a two-tiered transformation occurring in health.

The first is a transformation occurring at a health system level – organisations like hospitals are trying to keep up with a pace of change that is unparalleled in the digital world yet struggling to meet those changes in an effective and coordinated manner.

The second change is a consumer-driven transformation – consumers are adopting Fitbits, wearables and internet of things at an extravagant pace yet often find themselves unable to either make sense of the data from these tools nor integrate them with the digital infrastructure of the health system (including hospital health records).

Whilst significant integration activities such as the international nationalisation of health records are taking place on the part of organisations (small organisations through to government agencies), some key elements need to be taken into consideration in the implementation of more human-centered approaches into IT:

  1. Selecting the right starting point: From a system redesign perspective, it is important to first start with mapping out the patient journey and outcomes you want to achieve relative to the patient journey. The mistakes some health IT professionals make in this space is starting with system architecture design rather than patient journey design.
  2. Don’t try to look at what we’ve got and make it better: Instead, let’s look at what experiences and outcomes consumers want to achieve and redesign the system to achieve those goals.
  3. Link data in the journey, not systems: Instead of trying to link data between systems, think about linking the data between different points of the patient journey to improve the experience, insights and outcomes for patients on those points of the journey.
  4. Consider the patient’s entire eco-system: Aim for a future state where we can create mass behavioural personalisation within each technology system, so the lack of integration is not even noticed. Here’s what I mean by this. As the world of technology moves on, systems become more fragmented with multiple different devices and software tools that cater to various different niches. This then creates a challenge for the consumer in terms of integrating it with all the other technology they utilise. For example, a type 2 diabetic patient might have their own application (or app) for dealing with complications such as ulcers. While incredibly useful for the patient, he or she is challenged as to how to integrate it with all the other health apps, tools or software that he or she utilises. Solution vendors are often more vested in getting initial uptake and design their solutions with a very niche and siloed purpose. They care less about integrating it with other solutions within that patient’s technology ecosystem and environment. In the case of type 2 diabetic patient – if a more user-centred approach to systems is undertaken, the focus would be in mapping out the patient journey and ecosystem of technologies that surround that diabetic patient in order to make the entire experience as meaningful as possible.
  5. Health practitioner’s needs what consumer’s value. This final point is really a summarisation of the above. Once you’ve created a solution (ideally using a lean start-up approach), it is important to combine that with an evidence-based approach in terms of features and functionalities that are most appropriate for that diabetic patient. Remember that what health practitioners value in terms of the data collected is not always equivalent to what consumers value in the utilisation of a technology solution. Hence, we need to find the right balance or formula

Ideally, as the health system continues to bridge the gap between health professionals, organisations and consumers, we integrate the requirements from these various stakeholders and truly create patient-centred adoption of solutions that are aligned with organisational strategy, quality and safety objectives and patient experience key performance indicators (KPIs).

If you’d like to have chat with me about your thoughts on the digital patient experience, feel free to reach out to avnesh@energesse.com

 

What to do about ‘Internet’ Health? – A Tip on Execution

Just yesterday, I delivered a 6E Patient Experience Training Workshop at Sydney Children’s Hospital Network (SCHN). We had fantastic engagement with each of the 6Es – Experience, Emotions, Engagement, Execution, Excellence and Evolution. This step-by-step guide to implementing patient experience improvements and the 4th E, gave the clinicians very practical tips on how to execute. Here’s one.

Patients can ask clinicians a myriad of questions and can present a range of behaviours, based on their background, circumstances and their interaction with health information. With the latter, Dr Google is often their personal, trusted friend. So how do we manage ‘Internet Health’?

I interviewed e-patient Dave at a Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) talk a few months ago, who had an interesting opinion about prescribing the internet. His key message was that while using the internet for information was perfectly fine, it was important that patients validate the information by talking to their doctors and other patients. Urging patients to talk about what they have found online will encourage ongoing validation, honest discussions and confident involvement in health decisions and treatment. Ultimately, a better patient experience is delivered.

Watch my interview below for Dave’s perspective…

If you are interested in 6E training or further tips for your clinicians in executing patient experience, don’t hesitate to give us a call.

 

Breaking News! Winner of the Energesse Patient Experience Awards

We are thrilled to announce the winner of the Energesse Patient Experience Award (Asia)…

Bagan Specialist Centre (BSC) in Penang, Malaysia

Here’s a bit of background on their journey….

In August 2017, Energesse undertook a two-day 6E training session for 30 different public and private hospitals in Malaysia. After the training session, the participants were challenged with planning, developing and implementing a patient experience improvement initiative in their settings, using Energesse’s 6E Framework. In the 3 months following the training, Bagan Specialist Centre engaged the 6Es – Experience, Emotions, Engagement, Execution, Excellence, Evolution – in the improvement of the patient experience in Food Services.

We travelled to Penang to present the award to them and saw first-hand the improvement BSC Food Services made to provide healthy food on-the-go to patients during the temporary closure of their cafeteria. They initiated the improvement after measuring patient Experience and Emotions regarding lack of dining options (which was negatively affecting patients’ experience at wait times). Staff Engagement at team departmental meetings resulted in ideas to address the issue. Execution of the solution involved transforming an old abandoned trolley into a mobile food cart offering a variety of nutritious meals. It was wheeled around the hospital outpatient and inpatient units by food services staff. BSC achieved Excellence when they saw a 10.2% decrease in the amount of feedback and an average patient satisfaction score of 3.5 which exceeded the hospital’s target rating of 3.0. In a bid to see constant Evolution of their solution, monthly analysis of the sales of food items and food costs were performed to ensure that mobile food cart items offered to BSC patients and visitors were culturally appropriate and sustainable.

Here are some pics from the Training and Award presentation… 

Congratulations Bagan Specialist Centre!

Watch this space for the Australian winner of the Energesse Patient Experience Award…

If you want to find out more about how the 6E Framework can help you with your patient experience initiatives, talk to us!

The Energesse Patient Experience Awards is an award established to recognise the efforts of a health setting in improving the patient experience through the utilisation of the Energesse 6E Framework. The judging panel for the Award was made up of Dr Avi Ratnanesan (CEO, Energesse), Michael Greco (CEO, Patient Opinion Australia), Simon Kimber (MES UK), Nick Goodman (MES UK), Ashok Rudy (Director, Energesse Malaysia) and Kiran Nair (Research Manager, Energesse).

 

A Patient Story to Inspire You Today…

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you’ve come back refreshed from the holidays and ready to start the year off with a bang! Here’s an inspirational story to help you – with your New Year resolutions, your own personal health or your understanding of the patients and consumers you encounter everyday.

I met Alana Henderson, a patient advocate, at a HISA talk late last year. A woman who had a stroke at the age of 59 (not to mention diabetes and cancer) who changed her life by project managing her health like an engineer. Find out more about how she transitioned out of her dire health circumstances (for less than AUD$300!) through her book ‘Out of the Fog’ (available on Amazon) OR watch the interview below now…

Alana’s key message to practitioners and providers is to ‘not be afraid of what patients do for themselves’. Support the involvement they have in their own care and you can be assured of delivering a meaningful patient experience.

Talk to us now if you are thinking of spearheading initiatives this year around just that! We’ve all the advice, support, training or technology you might need.