Time to fly: how the Patient Experience Accelerator drives connections

Here’s Sammy Twito’s go-to icebreaker story: she grew up in a corner of Montana so rural that her home was 45 miles from the nearest school. Her dad was a pilot and owned a small plane, and on days when they were running late, he took advantage of it. “He’d be like, hop in the plane, we’re flying,” she recalls. “The airport was right next to the school, so people would see me fly in and I thought it was the most absolutely embarrassing thing that could ever happen to me.”?

Not the most common childhood mortification. But an experience, perhaps, that has prepared her to find common ground among disparate teams – and for the four-state road-trip she and her team have undertaken to align patient experience across the enterprise.??

“We’ve wrapped up 31 sites now,” she says. “Two to go.”?

As director of patient experience for inpatient and pediatrics – along with Jenna Gonzalez, RN, MSN, over ambulatory and Sahar Ameri, MBA, over outpatient, oncology and hospice & homecare – she helms the Patient Experience Accelerator, an all-sites effort to operationalize best practices and improve the patient experience.?

In the Peaks Region, patient experience has been supported by one director at each care site, often in a silo with little enterprise support. Canyons employed a service-line focused approach supported by as many as eight caregivers, and that’s the model Patient Experience Accelerator is working to operationalize, putting patient experience leaders in collaboration with each other not only at their hospital sites, but across the enterprise.?

“Our job is to look at the big picture,” she says. “That’s part of the reason why it’s so important to us to go out to each care site, because we’re listening to their unique needs and challenges and showing them how they can operationalize best practices as leaders.”?

The process starts with training leaders to drive effective practices on their units. They accomplish that by deploying patient experience bundles, evidence-based practices that improve safety, equity and quality of care. At the most granular level, it’s also about data: unit-specific, customized approaches driven by real-time patient feedback.?

“Take bedside shift reports,” says Sammy. “This is a process of handing off from one nurse to another and involving the patient to go over all the specifics of that patient’s care. We might identify a department that’s doing it really well, and their patients are telling us we’re killing it. And then we might find a department where they’re saying, we just cannot hardwire this. So we might engage those leaders to talk about the barriers and how this one team has overcome those challenges.”?

“The majority of people feel like they’re very unique. Nobody gets us. We’re very different. But the challenges and strengths we see are so similar. Part of this process is finding out how similar we truly are.”?- Sammy Twito

In some ways, it’s the project Sammy’s entire career has been leading to. In college, she thought she wanted to be a teacher, but a summer job as a certified nursing assistant changed her mind.??

“I just wanted something that I could work a 12-hour shift and have days off,” she recalls. “And it really was one of the hardest jobs, but I felt like I was seriously making a difference for those patients. And I was like, yeah, this is where I’m meant to be.”?

Her first job out of nursing school was in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at St. Vincent Regional Hospital in Billings, and she’s been with the organization for the 19 years since, aside from a stint as a healthcare consultant, where she first acquired skills and expertise in patient experience work.?

“Then I came back and it set me up kind of perfectly to lead the Montana market for patient experience,” she says.?

That led to leading patient experience for the Peaks Region, and most recently, to leading inpatient and pediatrics for the enterprise, encompassing all 33 hospitals plus Primary Children’s.?

One thing she’s learned: it’s all about connection.?

“The majority of people feel like they’re very unique,” she says. “Nobody gets us. We’re very different. But the challenges and strengths we see are so similar. Part of this process is finding out how similar we truly are.”?

For example, in Montana, Holy Rosary Hospital has long been the Peaks Region's only critical access hospital - generally defined as a rural hospital with fewer than 25 acute care beds.?

That isolation has led to challenges with patient experience scores. In Canyons, meanwhile, Garfield Memorial Hospital in rural Panguitch, Utah, boasts the highest patient experience performance in the enterprise.?

Patient Experience Accelerator has facilitated a partnership between leadership at both facilities.?

For Sammy, the most surprising aspect of the work so far has been the level of engagement she’s seen. As leader of a team that is driven by feedback, she solicits it for herself from the teams she’s been meeting with, and the comments have been stellar.?

That’s exciting for Sammy, because at the end of the day, patient experience isn’t just about feedback.?

“It’s rooted in quality and safety,” she says. “That’s the reason we do the bedside shift report. It’s the reason for so many of our practices. Sometimes I think patient experience comes off as fluffy soft skills, but it’s really about creating consistency within the care we deliver, because every single patient deserves to have exceptional care.”?