Showcasing patient experience and engagement best practices through an innovative forum celebrating patients, families, and multidisciplinary care teams

A platform was designed for interdisciplinary teams to learn from colleagues, patients, and their families, about what creates and sustains positive, lasting impressions from their care team. A forum focused on positive experiences designed to highlight the relationships between patients and care teams was utilized. A Best Practices Forum was designed to share methods for generating positive patient experiences across the institution. These quarterly conferences featured patient stories and highlighted best practices such as empathic communications, collaboration, and teamwork used by caregivers throughout the institution. The patient experience team invited various well-performing departments to share best practices, as well as assisted in identifying patients willing to share their healthcare journey in front of an audience of clinical and non-clinical staff. The forum serves as an innovative learning lab using our patients and care team members as instructors of best practices in patient experience and patient engagement

The evolution and integration of a patient-centric mapping tool (patient journey value mapping) in continuous quality improvement

The need to improve a healthcare system that too frequently fails to deliver benefits of care, even resulting in harm to patients, has been well established. The resulting era of quality improvement has aimed to improve the delivery of care by increasing quality while reducing cost. One approach to improving how healthcare is delivered is the application of Lean management strategies. Despite widespread investment in Lean approaches to improve healthcare delivery, evidence supports a deficiency of this approach to improve patient satisfaction with care. Identifiable operational tension between quality improvement efforts designed to streamline care processes and those targeting improvement of the patient care experience existed. We set out to address this deficiency by embedding the patient experience into improvement efforts through the introduction of a patient-centric value stream mapping approach