Continuing her series on patient experience, healthcare operations, and quality care, Brandi Jones, Senior Operations Analyst at M.S. Hall and Associates

The patient experience can be easy to overlook amid the complex goings on of a healthcare facility. However, effective healthcare depends on a patient-centered approach, which means that constantly assessing and improving patient engagement as part of your organization’s continuous improvement journey. As value-based reimbursement and care grow more widespread, patient experience is becoming a key indicator of any healthcare organization’s operational and clinical performance.

Patient surveys are therefore an indispensable tool in your organization’s assessment arsenal – they are a direct means to track your performance on patient experience and can provide an important index for organizational health more broadly. It’s important that your survey tools are designed to have maximum effect. That means excluding “white noise” questions that distract from your organization’s patient experience priorities. Put together a team and invest in brainstorming and testing different modes of survey deployment that best fit your patient population. Spend time considering the balance of quantitative and qualitative data your organization should collect. Both aspects are essential to painting a complete patient experience picture, allowing you to generate critical performance insights from multiple angles.

And as your organization reflects on the results of these patient surveys, remember to center empathy at every stage. Consider the human-centered design golden rule:

Design systems that treat others how you would want to be treated.

Of course, it’s important for your workforce to be highly skilled, but unless that skill is paired with deep empathy for the patient population, how they experience care delivery, the quality of your organization’s care – and the quality of the patient experience itself – will fall short.