3 Reasons Why 360-Degree Patient Engagement Improves HCAHPS

Professionals in the healthcare field know a better patient experience directly translates to increased patient satisfaction scores and positive impact to hospital reimbursements.

Medicare’s Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey (HCAHPS) has been asking patient’s to rate their hospital stays since 2006—and for the past four years, Medicare has tied hospital reimbursements in part to their HCAHPS scores.

Providing patients easy ways to engage in their care and including nurses in the communication to monitor and quickly resolve patient concerns in real time is key to improving the patient experience. Innovative mobile patient experience rounding solutions enable patients to make requests or ask for help with easy-to-use touchpoint access.

At the same time, this communication is automatically delivered to the nursing team for immediate visibility and automation of workflows that streamlines service responses and timeliness. Here are the top three reasons your organization needs 360° experiences for your patients.

Patients are empowered.

They no longer have to wait for a nurse to request an extra blanket or room temperature change. With interactive patient engagement capabilities, patients now can simply use their in-room television, tablet or bedside touch screen to make those requests. Do they prefer chocolate milk over regular? There’s an easy way to communicate that preference.

Patients can use the interactive system to ask questions about their medications or educational videos they’ve viewed, provide real-time feedback on their care and even note their preferences with immediate visibility to all nurse rounding teams. A 360° approach puts the patient at the forefront with greater control of their hospital stay environment yet includes and informs the care delivery team at the same time.

Problems are resolved quickly. 

Using automated workflows, a patient’s request is routed and delivered to the right department to handle immediately. With 360° workflow automation, patient service requests from the interactive patient bedside system are sent to the ancillary services to be handled in real time.

Management has the visibility into all service requests and response time status on dashboards which helps drive accountability across units and departments while arming the care delivery members with real status information. Robust reporting highlights failure points and areas for improvements in the teams’ productivity and cycle times associated with the care management.

Nurses are more effective and engaged.

Nurses now have easy visibility into all patient notes, preferences and rounding history—all before they walk in to the patient’s room. This promotes a conversation with the patient and personalizes their experience rather than going through a list of impersonal survey questions. Nurses have the ability to escalate issues with a touch of a button, which gives them more time to focus on patient care and improving the patient experience.

Nurse Managers and Directors can easily view census metrics, rounding completion rates and domains that are not met.  With this information, they can make changes for patients and improve their satisfaction while they remain in the hospital.   

With a 360° approach to communication and service recovery, patients have a more positive hospital experience which increases HCAHPS domain scores. Nurse rounding becomes more efficient with personalized conversations based on feedback from the patients. 

Here’s the bottom line—this approach allows nurses more time to spend on quality, patient care.  The patients feel more valued and in control. Managers have the visibility needed to continually enhance accountability and improve performance. 

Lauren Walling

Lauren Walling is a graduate of Emory University with a degree in Industrial Psychology, as well as an MBA from the John Sykes School of Business from The University of Tampa. She is a member of the Healthcare Business Women's Association, National Association of Professional Women, and the Morton Plant Corporate Membership and Planters Society. Lauren works with large Healthcare Systems implementing Patient Experience and Outcome Solutions that streamline processes, increase patient experience and improve quality and safety.