Cultural Transformations In Healthcare To Improve The Patient Experience

Celebrating with the fantastic team from Westchester Medical Center following their “Two-Day Cultural Blueprint Workshop”

The Real Secret To Improving Patient Experience

About 80% of hospital executives say improving patient experience is a top priority. And yet, many focus on the latest programs or initiatives that may produce short-term boosts in HCAHPS but they don’t last very long.

The real secret to becoming a world-class organization is to create a culture of intention where every employee, from the front lines to the back offices, is aligned toward the same goals and can say with assurance this is how we do things here.

An Organizational Culture Transformation

It’s more than just telling employees to be nicer to patients and to each other. By involving every team member, across all lines of the patient experience, and making them the architects responsible for developing a new organizational culture, they’ve not only created it, they own it. This authorship and ownership leads to mutual accountability, which means your team will police it every day at all levels … even when you’re not around.

Integrated Loyalty Systems’ Cultural Master Plan (aka our secret sauce!)

Cultural Assessment and Employee Experience Evaluation

A careful examination of your existing culture as seen through the four “lenses” that comprise patient experience: people, product, process and physical setting. Assessments include formal and informal interviews and focus groups with patients and employees and multiple walk-throughs as seen through the patients’ eyes.

New Patient-Driven Culture Blueprint Design

“Operationalizing” the culture is the most critical element of the process: Cross-organizational representatives will: stipulate a common goal (“True North”) that defines everyone’s role; adopt an organization-wide set of decision-making priorities; and, construct a set of common service behaviors that collectively serve as a blueprint for the way we do things here.

Global Rollout

Once defined, new elements of your patient-driven culture are communicated across the organization in a way that fosters ownership and commitment. With the message delivered by representative staff (not leaders or consultants), the message being communicated is clear: “We created these cultural elements… they are what will differentiate us and help us deliver on our mission.”

Leaders Toolkit: To Localize By Department

At ILS, we add a critical step in the engagement process: a workshop to train leaders to translate the global messages into department-specific actions and behaviors with clear accountability. In addition to localizing the global message, leaders learn tools specifically designed to help them hardwire the new cultural elements into their departments and ensure sustainability.

Selection, Onboarding & Orientation

As your culture becomes more patient-driven, new employees must understand these cultural imperatives from their first days with the organization. Our team works with your existing orientation team to redesign an engaging, interactive experience for employees based on a simple principle: Treat new employees exactly the way you want them to treat patients and each other.

Hardwiring & Sustainability

The difference between customer service training programs and a long-term way of doing business lies in an organization’s ability to integrate world-class experiences throughout all leadership and employee operations and human resource elements.

”By involving every team member, across all lines of the patient experience, and making them the architects responsible for developing a new organizational culture, they’ve not only created it, they own it. This authorship and ownership leads to mutual accountability, which means your team will police it every day at all levels … even when you’re not around.”

Jake Poore
ILS President and Chief Experience Officer