Achieving the Quintuple Aim - Improving Patient Experience

By Milissa Campbell

We’ve reached the end of our Data-Driven #QuintupleAim exploration to discuss Patient Experience. I intentionally left this aim to the end of our series not because it isn’t a priority, but because truly elevating patient experience requires a healthy clinical workforce (Aim 1: Clinical Professional Experience), equitable access to the healthcare system (Aim 2: Health Equity), better health (Aim 3: Improved Outcomes), and affordable care (Aim 4: Lowered Costs). Rigor and focus on the other four aims will drive and sustain a better patient experience. However, that doesn’t mean there are no targeted, data-driven efforts that you can do immediately to drive a better patient experience.

When asked by clients what the silver bullet is to drive improved patient responses to surveys such as #HOS and #CAHPS, my response is execution rigor. While unsexy, it is the only thing that ensures you will improve a patient, member, and caregiver’s experience. We have all read articles full of great ideas, including verbal commitments, to improve experiences. Where these continue to fall flat is rigor, discipline, and sustainable execution. For execution to be sustainable, you need data to figure out where you are, where you want to go, and how you are progressing. Data plays a key role in each stage of improving patient experience:

Stage 0: Prepare

What data do you already have that provides insight into what your members/patients are experiencing? What are your complaint trends by category and root cause? What anecdotal information do you have from your front line about pain points for them and your patients/members? Are your patients or members disengaging from care at certain points consistently? Do they schedule but not show up? Do they call for benefits but not schedule? Collecting these points of view and data is a great exercise to do as you prepare to build your journey map. It will guide where to focus your improvement efforts. At Stage 0, don’t fall into the analysis paralysis trap - this is a “quick and dirty” analysis to provide initial guidance and should not demand significant time, effort, or resources.

Stage 1: Understand (Map and Gap)

By now we have all seen or built member/patient journey maps. These have varying levels of value. High-level versions can be a useful starting point, but if your journey explorations are not granular in understanding what a patient experiences while accessing and using your healthcare services, they are little more than a pretty infographic. Detailed journey or experience maps should at a minimum provide detail about:

• All possible touchpoints and when they occur (Process Mapping)
• Description of each touchpoint (length of time required, number of handoffs, number of resources, number of clicks, outcome or impact of the touchpoint. (Time Studies, Surveys, Process Maps)
• Patient member perception of the experience (Surveys, Sentiment Analysis)
• Workforce perception of the experience (Surveys, Time Studies, Point-in-Time Feedback)
• Gaps, redundancies, duplication, risks of patient/member disengagement at that touchpoint (Industry Best Practice Analysis, Retroactive Journey/Experience Analyses)

In the above list, I included the type of data collection efforts used to inform a data-driven patient/member journey map. This is just a starting point. Leverage your teams who do the work to add to this.

Stage 2: Re-Imagine

Using data from your preparation point of view and analysis to understand, begin to pinpoint what types of improvements you want to make.

Do you want to shorten the time of tasks? Decrease clicks? Improve perception?

Anything you want to improve should have a baseline data point from the first stage. Set your SMART goals. Reduce time to register by 25%, improve satisfaction to 90% Satisfied or Highly Satisfied, and increase the number of touchpoints with digital options. Small improvements, that sustain over time, become big improvements in experience. Prioritize your efforts by understanding how to get the greatest impact with the most effective use of resources. Re-draw your patient/member journey map with a future state that has achieved your goals. Are you missing something? Are there ripple effects that you didn’t anticipate? Do this step regularly to ensure you are progressing to your desired end state.

Stage 3: Measure

I cannot emphasize this step enough. Measure as much as you can at a frequency that delivers more value than resource cost. Measure and evaluate your progress, celebrate success, and be willing to fail and revise.

As part of re-measurement, recreate your Experience Journey Map and visualize the impact of your efforts. This begins your sustainable loop with the second stage. Measure, Reimagine, Repeat.

While this quick article is a good starting point, driving experience within healthcare is a significant undertaking and requires resources who are dedicated to it. Need help getting started, defining metrics, or assessing where your Patient Experience efforts are compared to the broader industry? Drop me a note and let’s discuss your achievement of the Quintuple Aim through Data.

Alternatively, revisit our full series of articles on how to achieve the quintuple aim via data-driven methods!