The fast-emerging critical element of the increasingly competitive healthcare puzzle has become "patient experience management." Along with clinical excellence and financial stability, healthcare systems are being ranked and evaluated by objective assessors and the public alike. Each and every way that a patient (and their family) touches your organization becomes part of the "patient experience."

We at ILS are uniquely qualified to help you have a positive impact on every aspect of your patients' experiences, bringing a combination of proven best practices in experience management, combined with years of healthcarespecific application.

System-wide strategies & one-on-one results.

All too frequently "managing the patient experience" is part of senior leadership meeting agendas, where inevitably the consensus is, "we're all responsible for managing the patient experience." While that may be true, only by having a dedicated individual or team in place - specifically tasked with managing patient experiences - can hospitals effectively cut through departmental turf issues and truly improve quality and efficiency all on behalf of patients. The solution: global strategies with local application.

Your leadership team will understand...

The responsibilities and obstacles that come with managing patient experiences and will help you answer fundamental questions like:

• Where does true patient loyalty come from?
• What is the best organizational approach to managing patient experiences?
• How do you "translate" global strategies to accommodate differences among departments (inpatient vs. outpatient, clinical vs. non-clinical)
• How can we "hardwire" patient experience management so that it becomes part of a continuous-improvement engine?

At ILS, the goal is always two fold:

To share proven best practices & transfer methodology

so that you quickly build in-house expertise. By "teaching you how to fish," your
improvement efforts are sustained, even without ILS by your side.

The new HCAHPS survey is the latest tool healthcare consumers will use to help make decisions about their health care providers. Designed to assist patients in comparing hospitals evenly, many health care systems are concerned that there may be some areas of the survey where their hospitals could use some "polishing."

We at ILS are uniquely prepared to help you have a positive impact on your HCAHPS scores and on the way you deliver on your mission of taking care of patients and, ultimately, earning their loyalty.

More that just "teaching to the test"

For years ILS has consulted with healthcare organizations to help them improve patient loyalty, which will now be measured globally under the HCAHPS initiative. The ILS approach is designed to jump-start improvements by sharing industry best practices, while simultaneously transferring our expertise by laying a foundation for continuous improvement that will build consistency and ensure positive, sustainable HCAHPS results for your hospital.

We work directly with your HCAHPS team to:

• Identify areas of focus based on survey question groupings (nurses, pain control, discharge, etc.)
• Break down specific experiences using ILS's unique Patient TouchPoint MappingSM methodology to identify key opportunities to positively impact the survey results.
• Prioritize improvement efforts using your hospital's own Effort/Impact criteria.
• Implement solutions for you, with you, or on your own.
• Hardwire an effective feedback process that includes training and accountability to ensure consistently high patient experiences throughout the hospital.

"By dissecting what patients go through from the patient's perspective, we're able to help hospitals better manage their patient's experience and, consequently, how patients respond to the HCAHPS survey."

- Jake Poore, President
Integrated Loyalty Systems Inc.

If your situation is like that of most healthcare organizations, then your employees feel overworked, overstressed, and are facing a unique set of challenges above and beyond those endemic to the current state of healthcare. While your employees are widely skilled clinically, the impact of acquisitions, personal life challenges, staffing levels, and a change in the types of patients all combine to threaten your goal of delivering on your hospital's promise for customer service.

A Proven Program Integrated with Your Service Culture

The goal is to provide your clinical staff with specific interpersonal skills they can use to improve patient interactions.

Additionally, we can further customize it to your organization's or department's goals and service behaviors.

The Program Overview

The overlaying theme of this 4-hour workshop is Diagnosis, Prescription, Medication. Difficult patient interactions require the proper emotional "diagnosis" to understand what is going on (and the underlying causes) and a "prescription" of appropriate, job-specific skills. By the end of the program, participants have a variety of interpersonal skill "medications" that they can elect to use to handle the situations they face.

This concept of having a choice in how to respond is critical to the acceptance of the skills… just like similar but different drugs may be prescribed for the same patient by different doctors.

• Module 1- Understanding Patient Expectations: Explore the importance of effectively handling interactions for patients, family members, co-workers and for the participants themselves.
• Module 2- The "Caring Prescription": To provide participants with a variety of job-specific skills that they can use to handle difficult patient interactions, as well as enhance everyday patient and co-worker interactions.
• Module 3- Really Difficult Situations: To assist participants with specific skills and strategies to resolve patient situations in a way corrects or minimizes negative consequences to the patient, the caregiver and the organization.
• Module 4- Service Recovery: To share with participants the elements of the service-recovery mnemonic "L-A-S-T-Plus," which is used when a mistake - real or perceived - has occurred.

The goal is to have every participant leave this program re-energized, knowing what they need to know and feeling like they are an integral, trusted and empowered member of your organization.