Are You Doing it for the Wrong Reasons?

No one gets a degree in patient experience, the expertise is earned, not learned. Maybe you were in nursing, administration, quality, or even from out of industry roles in hospitality or consumer experience.

In many circles, the reason you get into a field is called your "why". It's the intrinsic motivator that gets you out of bed every day wanting to make a difference. At some point you CHOSE to be in patient experience, most likely because you had a passion for it after seeing a friend or family dealing with the ups and downs of a healthcare journey. You probably assumed there had to be a better way.

Somewhere along your journey, you or your leadership decided the north star of your efforts should be a quantifiable metric, probably HCAHPS scores or likelihood to recommend on a survey. Maybe it's a green bubble on a balanced scorecard or a particular KPI (key performance indicator). And now when you get out of bed to get ready for work, that metric is your focus... it has become your new "why".

What's your why?

Ultimately, we need metrics to track improvement efforts. But it's time to get back to the reason you're doing this work: to help patients. The highest-performing health systems have found that going to extraordinary lengths to create a great patient experience leads to improved metrics. At some point in their journey, they had to make a decision that making patients their priority was not just a pretty slogan on the wall, but something they had to live by throughout every level of the organization. When they did that, the scores started taking care of themselves.