Capturing the Patient Voice
What if You Knew Exactly What Your Patients Were Thinking or Feeling?
Millions of patients seek medical care in the United States each day. Capturing the stories and experiences of these patients, understanding the delivery through their lens, represents a tremendous opportunity in health care. Patient advocacy, and patient-first care are essential in healthcare. What if healthcare organizations could know what a patient was feeling and thinking along each point of their care experience, not just at the very end?
Through empowerment and solicitation of patient input, the patient experience can be fine-tuned, even perfected, and the patient is then treated as an equal decision-maker in their care. Alternately, this conditions the care team to welcome more feedback, understanding that each patient experience can provide them with specific opportunities to improve care delivery.
This concept can be extended much further through the development and implementation of a framework that facilitates partnership between health care providers and patients and their families. At Virginia Mason, a Patient-Family Partner Program was successfully implemented and has since yielded thousands of patient volunteer hours and has delivered benefits and improvements to a myriad of health care processes and components.
What is the Patient Voice?
The patient voice represents the real-life perspective of each and every patient that walks through your doors. The way in which they perceive the environment, the ease of processes and timeline of their care, how they are informed and included in their health care decisions, and what they feel when leaving to go home; these are all crucial components of the patient experience, and provide valuable insights to where improvements are needed.
Capturing the patient voice is essentially standing in the shoes of the patient and gaining a sense of what they experience when they come in for their care. One Virginia Mason Patient-Family Partner Program volunteer, Phil Fergusson, shared, “From a patient’s perspective, it is reassuring to observe and it creates trust that the health care system has patient care as the highest priority.”
By identifying problems to fix at the granular level, right away, teams can design and continually refine new, improved processes.
The Importance of Listening
Capturing the patient’s voice is also essential to eliminating false assumptions. Having high levels of patient engagement in an organization improves overall communication between patients, families, and health care providers-making patient-first care even more possible. When staff engage the patient to better inform processes they receive first-hand insight into what is actually important to patients during their visit, rather than making any presumptions.
An example, shared by one Virginia Mason physician, is, after spending an hour explaining a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer to a patient, the patient looked to the physician and responded, “After you said, ‘cancer’, I didn’t hear another word you said.” The physician was surprised to learn they had missed the mark on what the patient needed in the first five minutes of the meeting by not sufficiently respecting the gravity of the news on the patient. This feedback greatly motivated the physician to improve in the future, having now learned that ‘how’ information is delivered to a patient can in certain situations mean more than the ‘what’.
Capturing the patient’s voice opens the floodgates to know when the patient is feeling more vulnerable, lonely, worried, empowered or happy along their care journey. Their experience can help inform where improvements can be made along the way, and encourage organizational advancements.
