At my current practice, we have overall low patient satisfaction scores. I am the nursing supervisor and for the back office we are in the 80th percentile, but the front office staff is in the 24th percentile. An expectation in our organization is that we consistently achieve the goal of being in the 75th percentile overall and we were at the 50th percentile.
Step 1: Establishing a sense of urgency- Upper management alerting leadership in the office that we were not maintaining the goal in patient satisfaction which can lead to budget cuts, lost contracts, etc.
Step 2: Creating the guiding coalition- We created a “patient satisfaction” group that focused on ways to implement changes that would lead to increased patient satisfaction scores. This group was optional, so the people that were in the group actually wanted to be there.
Step 3: Developing a vision & strategy- We came up with standard workflows for the front office for new patients as well as how the patient is checked in upon arrival. For new patients, we typically would not get all information at the time of the phone call which created longer wait times while the patient was actually in the office. By collecting all information on the phone first, this would create a faster check in process. We also changed the structure of our waiting room to make it easier and smoother for the check in/check out process. Our vision was to increase our patient satisfaction scores by at least 4% within a 6 week period.
Step 4: Communicating the change vision- Front office staff was trained on the new workflows by the front office supervisor in person. The change was communicated by email to the nursing staff so they were aware of the changes that would be happening also.
Step 5: Empowering employees for broad-based action-We posted a board that showed where our numbers are, and where we want them to be. We have an “idea sharing” section of the board where any staff member can post a suggestion on how to increase the scores. We then talk about these at our monthly meeting.
Step 6: Generating short-term wins- We checked back in as a team with the front office staff after a 2 week period to re-evaluate the workflows and to see if any changes were needed to the process. At that time, no changes were identified that needed to be done. Patients had given some feedback that they were pleased with the changes to the waiting room.
Step 7: Consolidating gains & producing more change- The group continues to meet monthly to identify strategies to increase patient satisfaction scores. We are now focusing on how to change the parking for our patients.
Step 8: Anchoring new approaches in the culture –Audits were conducted regularly on the standard work. People were adherent to the new workflows and it is now considered a habit/ the standard of the check in process.
[Steven Thomsen]. (2013, February 17). KOTTER’S 8 STEP ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE MODEL FC. [Video File]. Retrieved May 11, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxtF4OXzhyI#action=share
It’s hard to please all patients when working in an office. I worked at a pediatric clinic and even though we tried our best to schedule accordingly there were often long wait times. It’s really hard to know which patients require more care than others from what they tell you over the phone. It’s great that your management team made your patient satisfaction group optional, the effort and results of the desired change tend to be better when someone is there because they want to than because they were obligated to.
This was a good organizational assessment in your current place of practice. The possibility of budget cuts is an urgent matter. This would put any leader into a focus and caring position to motivate members of their team. Working as a team in your organizational assessment is an important allowing change to occur.