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Ask any expert on patient satisfaction why hospitalists should care about this issue and they all say the same thing: It’s the right thing to do.
But increasingly, it’s also the smart thing to do from a financial perspective. Most of the financial levers involved are aimed at hospitals, but they tend to trickle down to physicians.
Hospital value-based purchasing is one of the biggest drivers. Under the new program, which began in October 2012, hospitals have a small percentage of their total Medicare charges set aside into a pool used for awarding value-based incentives. Medicare officials measure the hospitals’ performance on a set of process of care measures and on patient satisfaction to determine the amount of the incentive. Depending on their performance, hospitals may earn more or less than what Medicare originally withheld for the incentive pool.
The government began the program by withholding 1% of total Medicare charges, increasing every year until reaching 2% in October 2016.
The program puts a hefty emphasis on patient satisfaction with 30% of the total score coming from performance on patient satisfaction. Medicare officials are using eight dimensions of the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores as the basis for grading performance on patient experience.
Even 1% can be a lot of money depending on the size and patient mix of the institution, said Dr. Peter H. Short, a former pediatric hospitalist and chief medical officer at Northeast Hospital Corp., a 258-bed community hospital network in Beverly, Mass., and a member of Lahey Health.
For instance, a hospital with $300 million in annual operating revenue could have about $150 million coming in from Medicare. That means that $1.5 million is at risk through the hospital value-based purchasing program, which puts a heavy emphasis on patient satisfaction.
"That’s nothing to sneeze at," Dr. Short said. "You don’t want to lose that."
And Medicare isn’t the only payer that is attaching dollars to patient satisfaction. More and more private insurers are including patient satisfaction scores as part of their pay for performance programs for hospitals, Dr. Short said.
All of this means that patient satisfaction is on the radar screen for hospital executives. And they in turn are leaning on hospitalists to make gains in HCAHPS scores.
In 2012, 71% of adult hospitalists with a performance incentive reported that they had measures related to patient satisfaction in the incentive, up from 54% in 2008, according to data collected by the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM).
"Hospital executives are saying, we’re paying a couple million dollars for this hospitalist program, we want them to be the solution to patient experience. Let’s incentivize that," said Dr. Winthrop F. Whitcomb, medical director of health care quality at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., and a past president of SHM.
Training for better satisfaction
In some institutions, hospitalists are actively training to do a better job at patient satisfaction. At Baystate Medical Center, simulations for good doctor-patient interactions are performed just as surgical ones are.
This spring, hospitalists there viewed a training video where they learned tactics for putting patients at ease and earning their trust. The strategies included everything from sitting down and making eye contact to providing patients with a business card with the physician’s photo. After that, hospitalists went into the simulation lab to sit down with former patients and act out common situations.
Dr. Whitcomb, who went through the training himself, said physicians introduced themselves, went through the details of a case, and in some cases explained test results. At the end of the simulation, the hospitalists got feedback on their performance.
The new training has been a hit with hospitalists and could be expanded to other physicians next, Dr. Whitcomb said.
At Northeast Hospital Corp., a 4-day workshop was recently conducted for hospitalists, nurses, case managers, and pharmacists at their Beverly, Mass., hospital. Actors were brought in to portray patients and family members, and the provider teams had a chance to simulate conversations with families.
A survey of providers after the workshop found that most providers thought they did a good job at the outset, but that they learned something to help them do a better job next time, Dr. Short said.
The next step will be to measure the hospital’s HCAHPS scores over the next few months to look for improvement, Dr. Short said.
It takes a team
But large-scale training and simulation efforts take resources and that requires buy-in from the hospital leadership, experts said.
Take the chair example. One of the common tactics for improving patient satisfaction is to sit down when in the patient’s room. Studies show that sitting down makes the patient feel like you’ve given them more time than if you were standing, even when the encounter is actually shorter. It also allows the physician and patient to be at the same eye level.
But what if there isn’t a chair in the room? Or the chair is filled with linens? That’s exactly what happened several years ago at Baystate Medical Center when they first tried to implement a set of behaviors aimed at improving patient satisfaction. To move forward, the physicians had to work with housekeeping to get a free, open chair in every room, Dr. Whitcomb said.
To be effective, patient satisfaction efforts have to include not just physicians and nurses but environmental services, transport, clinical associates, administrative associates, and the hospital board, Dr. Short said.
"You can’t do it alone. You shouldn’t do it alone. You won’t be able to do it alone," he said.
Dr. Short recommended starting with the hospital board because if they buy in, everyone else has to follow. And he said hospitalists shouldn’t be afraid to ask for the resources they need to get this done. Maybe the money goes to compensation incentives or to investments in improved technology in the department. Either way, if it’s important to the hospital leadership, they should provide some extra funding.
"Make it a partnership and not a one way," he said.
Another key element for success is measurement. And HCAHPS scores alone are probably not going to be adequate to advance improvements, said Dr. Richard Slataper, medical director of the hospital medicine service at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, La. While HCAHPS scores are good for aggregate hospitalwide data, it’s difficult to impossible to relate the scores to specific physicians, he said.
At Our Lady of the Lake, they got around this issue by creating their own simple patient feedback form. The short questionnaire is mailed out to patients after discharge and includes the names of the physicians involved in that patient’s care. Dr. Slataper said they use the homegrown survey to judge if their patient satisfaction initiatives have been successful. Sharing the results is also a good motivator for the providers, he said.
They share all of the positive feedback from the surveys at a staff meeting and then review negative feedback during one-on-one meetings.
If developing your own survey is too complex, Dr. Whitcomb said most of the big vendors have or are developing surveys that can be used to gauge individual physician performance more accurately than HCAHPS.
Hurdles remain
Despite all the talk about patient satisfaction and the increasingly aligned financial incentives, physicians and hospitals are still struggling to make improvements. One problem is that hospitalists practice all over the hospital – from the observation unit to the ICU – and it can be difficult to take the tactics available and practice them consistently, said Dr. Steven B. Deitelzweig, vice president of medical affairs and chair of hospital medicine at Ochsner Health System in New Orleans.
Co-location, where physicians work consistently with the same team of providers, could help alleviate part of the problem, Dr. Deitelzweig said. Another possible solution is increased coaching and mentoring among hospitalists, he said. As a result of the high volume of patient handoffs, hospitalists have a greater opportunity to see each other at work. That’s also an opportunity to share effective tactics when it comes to patient satisfaction, he said.
A tougher hurdle may be that patient satisfaction is being added to a long list of requirements for hospitalists from core measures to hospital-acquired infections to improved documentation.
"They are kind of inundated, and I think some hospitalists are a little bewildered," Dr. Whitcomb said.
His best advice to hospitalists is to remember to "keep the patient at the center" and patient satisfaction will follow.
Dos and don’ts for improving patient satisfaction
Wondering how to get started on improving patient satisfaction? Dr. Peter Short of Northeast Hospital Corporation in Beverly, Mass., suggests that hospitalists get started by choosing three tactics, implementing them, and then measuring their impact. Once those items are hard-wired in the program, move on to other strategies for connecting with patients, he said.
Here are Dr. Short’s dos and don’ts for improving the patient experience.
• Knock on the patient’s door before going in. By doing that you are asking the patient’s permission to come in and showing them respect.
• Introduce yourself and hand out a brochure explaining the hospitalist program. A lot of patients still don’t know what a hospitalist program is and that it’s the hospitalist’s job to communicate with their primary care physician.
• Offer patients and their family members a business card with a photo.
• Connect on a personal level by talking about something other than the patient’s medical care. Ask about the food. How is the TV? It only takes a second to ask.
• Use props to your advantage. Whiteboards in the room are a great place to put the physician’s name and facts about the plan of care. But if the whiteboard isn’t filled out or up-to-date, it can be worse than having no board at all. So make sure it is updated and that all the hospitalists have a steady supply of markers.
• Get a chair and sit down. If you remain standing during the visit, it looks like you want to be somewhere else. Always make sure your patients feel that you have as much time as they need, even if you don’t.
• Never pass a call light. This takes a lot of collaboration by all the providers on the floor. But when hospital staff members pass their room when the call light is on, it makes them feel abandoned.
• Never tell a patient that you are so busy or that you have so many patients. "They don’t want to hear it. What they want to hear is that they are either the most important patient to you or they want to feel like they are the only patient you have to take care of," Dr. Short said. Telling patients about your busy schedule is the surest way to see your scores plummet.
On Twitter @MaryEllenNY
Ask any expert on patient satisfaction why hospitalists should care about this issue and they all say the same thing: It’s the right thing to do.
But increasingly, it’s also the smart thing to do from a financial perspective. Most of the financial levers involved are aimed at hospitals, but they tend to trickle down to physicians.
Hospital value-based purchasing is one of the biggest drivers. Under the new program, which began in October 2012, hospitals have a small percentage of their total Medicare charges set aside into a pool used for awarding value-based incentives. Medicare officials measure the hospitals’ performance on a set of process of care measures and on patient satisfaction to determine the amount of the incentive. Depending on their performance, hospitals may earn more or less than what Medicare originally withheld for the incentive pool.
The government began the program by withholding 1% of total Medicare charges, increasing every year until reaching 2% in October 2016.
The program puts a hefty emphasis on patient satisfaction with 30% of the total score coming from performance on patient satisfaction. Medicare officials are using eight dimensions of the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores as the basis for grading performance on patient experience.
Even 1% can be a lot of money depending on the size and patient mix of the institution, said Dr. Peter H. Short, a former pediatric hospitalist and chief medical officer at Northeast Hospital Corp., a 258-bed community hospital network in Beverly, Mass., and a member of Lahey Health.
For instance, a hospital with $300 million in annual operating revenue could have about $150 million coming in from Medicare. That means that $1.5 million is at risk through the hospital value-based purchasing program, which puts a heavy emphasis on patient satisfaction.
"That’s nothing to sneeze at," Dr. Short said. "You don’t want to lose that."
And Medicare isn’t the only payer that is attaching dollars to patient satisfaction. More and more private insurers are including patient satisfaction scores as part of their pay for performance programs for hospitals, Dr. Short said.
All of this means that patient satisfaction is on the radar screen for hospital executives. And they in turn are leaning on hospitalists to make gains in HCAHPS scores.
In 2012, 71% of adult hospitalists with a performance incentive reported that they had measures related to patient satisfaction in the incentive, up from 54% in 2008, according to data collected by the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM).
"Hospital executives are saying, we’re paying a couple million dollars for this hospitalist program, we want them to be the solution to patient experience. Let’s incentivize that," said Dr. Winthrop F. Whitcomb, medical director of health care quality at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., and a past president of SHM.
Training for better satisfaction
In some institutions, hospitalists are actively training to do a better job at patient satisfaction. At Baystate Medical Center, simulations for good doctor-patient interactions are performed just as surgical ones are.
This spring, hospitalists there viewed a training video where they learned tactics for putting patients at ease and earning their trust. The strategies included everything from sitting down and making eye contact to providing patients with a business card with the physician’s photo. After that, hospitalists went into the simulation lab to sit down with former patients and act out common situations.
Dr. Whitcomb, who went through the training himself, said physicians introduced themselves, went through the details of a case, and in some cases explained test results. At the end of the simulation, the hospitalists got feedback on their performance.
The new training has been a hit with hospitalists and could be expanded to other physicians next, Dr. Whitcomb said.
At Northeast Hospital Corp., a 4-day workshop was recently conducted for hospitalists, nurses, case managers, and pharmacists at their Beverly, Mass., hospital. Actors were brought in to portray patients and family members, and the provider teams had a chance to simulate conversations with families.
A survey of providers after the workshop found that most providers thought they did a good job at the outset, but that they learned something to help them do a better job next time, Dr. Short said.
The next step will be to measure the hospital’s HCAHPS scores over the next few months to look for improvement, Dr. Short said.
It takes a team
But large-scale training and simulation efforts take resources and that requires buy-in from the hospital leadership, experts said.
Take the chair example. One of the common tactics for improving patient satisfaction is to sit down when in the patient’s room. Studies show that sitting down makes the patient feel like you’ve given them more time than if you were standing, even when the encounter is actually shorter. It also allows the physician and patient to be at the same eye level.
But what if there isn’t a chair in the room? Or the chair is filled with linens? That’s exactly what happened several years ago at Baystate Medical Center when they first tried to implement a set of behaviors aimed at improving patient satisfaction. To move forward, the physicians had to work with housekeeping to get a free, open chair in every room, Dr. Whitcomb said.
To be effective, patient satisfaction efforts have to include not just physicians and nurses but environmental services, transport, clinical associates, administrative associates, and the hospital board, Dr. Short said.
"You can’t do it alone. You shouldn’t do it alone. You won’t be able to do it alone," he said.
Dr. Short recommended starting with the hospital board because if they buy in, everyone else has to follow. And he said hospitalists shouldn’t be afraid to ask for the resources they need to get this done. Maybe the money goes to compensation incentives or to investments in improved technology in the department. Either way, if it’s important to the hospital leadership, they should provide some extra funding.
"Make it a partnership and not a one way," he said.
Another key element for success is measurement. And HCAHPS scores alone are probably not going to be adequate to advance improvements, said Dr. Richard Slataper, medical director of the hospital medicine service at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, La. While HCAHPS scores are good for aggregate hospitalwide data, it’s difficult to impossible to relate the scores to specific physicians, he said.
At Our Lady of the Lake, they got around this issue by creating their own simple patient feedback form. The short questionnaire is mailed out to patients after discharge and includes the names of the physicians involved in that patient’s care. Dr. Slataper said they use the homegrown survey to judge if their patient satisfaction initiatives have been successful. Sharing the results is also a good motivator for the providers, he said.
They share all of the positive feedback from the surveys at a staff meeting and then review negative feedback during one-on-one meetings.
If developing your own survey is too complex, Dr. Whitcomb said most of the big vendors have or are developing surveys that can be used to gauge individual physician performance more accurately than HCAHPS.
Hurdles remain
Despite all the talk about patient satisfaction and the increasingly aligned financial incentives, physicians and hospitals are still struggling to make improvements. One problem is that hospitalists practice all over the hospital – from the observation unit to the ICU – and it can be difficult to take the tactics available and practice them consistently, said Dr. Steven B. Deitelzweig, vice president of medical affairs and chair of hospital medicine at Ochsner Health System in New Orleans.
Co-location, where physicians work consistently with the same team of providers, could help alleviate part of the problem, Dr. Deitelzweig said. Another possible solution is increased coaching and mentoring among hospitalists, he said. As a result of the high volume of patient handoffs, hospitalists have a greater opportunity to see each other at work. That’s also an opportunity to share effective tactics when it comes to patient satisfaction, he said.
A tougher hurdle may be that patient satisfaction is being added to a long list of requirements for hospitalists from core measures to hospital-acquired infections to improved documentation.
"They are kind of inundated, and I think some hospitalists are a little bewildered," Dr. Whitcomb said.
His best advice to hospitalists is to remember to "keep the patient at the center" and patient satisfaction will follow.
Dos and don’ts for improving patient satisfaction
Wondering how to get started on improving patient satisfaction? Dr. Peter Short of Northeast Hospital Corporation in Beverly, Mass., suggests that hospitalists get started by choosing three tactics, implementing them, and then measuring their impact. Once those items are hard-wired in the program, move on to other strategies for connecting with patients, he said.
Here are Dr. Short’s dos and don’ts for improving the patient experience.
• Knock on the patient’s door before going in. By doing that you are asking the patient’s permission to come in and showing them respect.
• Introduce yourself and hand out a brochure explaining the hospitalist program. A lot of patients still don’t know what a hospitalist program is and that it’s the hospitalist’s job to communicate with their primary care physician.
• Offer patients and their family members a business card with a photo.
• Connect on a personal level by talking about something other than the patient’s medical care. Ask about the food. How is the TV? It only takes a second to ask.
• Use props to your advantage. Whiteboards in the room are a great place to put the physician’s name and facts about the plan of care. But if the whiteboard isn’t filled out or up-to-date, it can be worse than having no board at all. So make sure it is updated and that all the hospitalists have a steady supply of markers.
• Get a chair and sit down. If you remain standing during the visit, it looks like you want to be somewhere else. Always make sure your patients feel that you have as much time as they need, even if you don’t.
• Never pass a call light. This takes a lot of collaboration by all the providers on the floor. But when hospital staff members pass their room when the call light is on, it makes them feel abandoned.
• Never tell a patient that you are so busy or that you have so many patients. "They don’t want to hear it. What they want to hear is that they are either the most important patient to you or they want to feel like they are the only patient you have to take care of," Dr. Short said. Telling patients about your busy schedule is the surest way to see your scores plummet.
On Twitter @MaryEllenNY
Ask any expert on patient satisfaction why hospitalists should care about this issue and they all say the same thing: It’s the right thing to do.
But increasingly, it’s also the smart thing to do from a financial perspective. Most of the financial levers involved are aimed at hospitals, but they tend to trickle down to physicians.
Hospital value-based purchasing is one of the biggest drivers. Under the new program, which began in October 2012, hospitals have a small percentage of their total Medicare charges set aside into a pool used for awarding value-based incentives. Medicare officials measure the hospitals’ performance on a set of process of care measures and on patient satisfaction to determine the amount of the incentive. Depending on their performance, hospitals may earn more or less than what Medicare originally withheld for the incentive pool.
The government began the program by withholding 1% of total Medicare charges, increasing every year until reaching 2% in October 2016.
The program puts a hefty emphasis on patient satisfaction with 30% of the total score coming from performance on patient satisfaction. Medicare officials are using eight dimensions of the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores as the basis for grading performance on patient experience.
Even 1% can be a lot of money depending on the size and patient mix of the institution, said Dr. Peter H. Short, a former pediatric hospitalist and chief medical officer at Northeast Hospital Corp., a 258-bed community hospital network in Beverly, Mass., and a member of Lahey Health.
For instance, a hospital with $300 million in annual operating revenue could have about $150 million coming in from Medicare. That means that $1.5 million is at risk through the hospital value-based purchasing program, which puts a heavy emphasis on patient satisfaction.
"That’s nothing to sneeze at," Dr. Short said. "You don’t want to lose that."
And Medicare isn’t the only payer that is attaching dollars to patient satisfaction. More and more private insurers are including patient satisfaction scores as part of their pay for performance programs for hospitals, Dr. Short said.
All of this means that patient satisfaction is on the radar screen for hospital executives. And they in turn are leaning on hospitalists to make gains in HCAHPS scores.
In 2012, 71% of adult hospitalists with a performance incentive reported that they had measures related to patient satisfaction in the incentive, up from 54% in 2008, according to data collected by the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM).
"Hospital executives are saying, we’re paying a couple million dollars for this hospitalist program, we want them to be the solution to patient experience. Let’s incentivize that," said Dr. Winthrop F. Whitcomb, medical director of health care quality at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., and a past president of SHM.
Training for better satisfaction
In some institutions, hospitalists are actively training to do a better job at patient satisfaction. At Baystate Medical Center, simulations for good doctor-patient interactions are performed just as surgical ones are.
This spring, hospitalists there viewed a training video where they learned tactics for putting patients at ease and earning their trust. The strategies included everything from sitting down and making eye contact to providing patients with a business card with the physician’s photo. After that, hospitalists went into the simulation lab to sit down with former patients and act out common situations.
Dr. Whitcomb, who went through the training himself, said physicians introduced themselves, went through the details of a case, and in some cases explained test results. At the end of the simulation, the hospitalists got feedback on their performance.
The new training has been a hit with hospitalists and could be expanded to other physicians next, Dr. Whitcomb said.
At Northeast Hospital Corp., a 4-day workshop was recently conducted for hospitalists, nurses, case managers, and pharmacists at their Beverly, Mass., hospital. Actors were brought in to portray patients and family members, and the provider teams had a chance to simulate conversations with families.
A survey of providers after the workshop found that most providers thought they did a good job at the outset, but that they learned something to help them do a better job next time, Dr. Short said.
The next step will be to measure the hospital’s HCAHPS scores over the next few months to look for improvement, Dr. Short said.
It takes a team
But large-scale training and simulation efforts take resources and that requires buy-in from the hospital leadership, experts said.
Take the chair example. One of the common tactics for improving patient satisfaction is to sit down when in the patient’s room. Studies show that sitting down makes the patient feel like you’ve given them more time than if you were standing, even when the encounter is actually shorter. It also allows the physician and patient to be at the same eye level.
But what if there isn’t a chair in the room? Or the chair is filled with linens? That’s exactly what happened several years ago at Baystate Medical Center when they first tried to implement a set of behaviors aimed at improving patient satisfaction. To move forward, the physicians had to work with housekeeping to get a free, open chair in every room, Dr. Whitcomb said.
To be effective, patient satisfaction efforts have to include not just physicians and nurses but environmental services, transport, clinical associates, administrative associates, and the hospital board, Dr. Short said.
"You can’t do it alone. You shouldn’t do it alone. You won’t be able to do it alone," he said.
Dr. Short recommended starting with the hospital board because if they buy in, everyone else has to follow. And he said hospitalists shouldn’t be afraid to ask for the resources they need to get this done. Maybe the money goes to compensation incentives or to investments in improved technology in the department. Either way, if it’s important to the hospital leadership, they should provide some extra funding.
"Make it a partnership and not a one way," he said.
Another key element for success is measurement. And HCAHPS scores alone are probably not going to be adequate to advance improvements, said Dr. Richard Slataper, medical director of the hospital medicine service at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, La. While HCAHPS scores are good for aggregate hospitalwide data, it’s difficult to impossible to relate the scores to specific physicians, he said.
At Our Lady of the Lake, they got around this issue by creating their own simple patient feedback form. The short questionnaire is mailed out to patients after discharge and includes the names of the physicians involved in that patient’s care. Dr. Slataper said they use the homegrown survey to judge if their patient satisfaction initiatives have been successful. Sharing the results is also a good motivator for the providers, he said.
They share all of the positive feedback from the surveys at a staff meeting and then review negative feedback during one-on-one meetings.
If developing your own survey is too complex, Dr. Whitcomb said most of the big vendors have or are developing surveys that can be used to gauge individual physician performance more accurately than HCAHPS.
Hurdles remain
Despite all the talk about patient satisfaction and the increasingly aligned financial incentives, physicians and hospitals are still struggling to make improvements. One problem is that hospitalists practice all over the hospital – from the observation unit to the ICU – and it can be difficult to take the tactics available and practice them consistently, said Dr. Steven B. Deitelzweig, vice president of medical affairs and chair of hospital medicine at Ochsner Health System in New Orleans.
Co-location, where physicians work consistently with the same team of providers, could help alleviate part of the problem, Dr. Deitelzweig said. Another possible solution is increased coaching and mentoring among hospitalists, he said. As a result of the high volume of patient handoffs, hospitalists have a greater opportunity to see each other at work. That’s also an opportunity to share effective tactics when it comes to patient satisfaction, he said.
A tougher hurdle may be that patient satisfaction is being added to a long list of requirements for hospitalists from core measures to hospital-acquired infections to improved documentation.
"They are kind of inundated, and I think some hospitalists are a little bewildered," Dr. Whitcomb said.
His best advice to hospitalists is to remember to "keep the patient at the center" and patient satisfaction will follow.
Dos and don’ts for improving patient satisfaction
Wondering how to get started on improving patient satisfaction? Dr. Peter Short of Northeast Hospital Corporation in Beverly, Mass., suggests that hospitalists get started by choosing three tactics, implementing them, and then measuring their impact. Once those items are hard-wired in the program, move on to other strategies for connecting with patients, he said.
Here are Dr. Short’s dos and don’ts for improving the patient experience.
• Knock on the patient’s door before going in. By doing that you are asking the patient’s permission to come in and showing them respect.
• Introduce yourself and hand out a brochure explaining the hospitalist program. A lot of patients still don’t know what a hospitalist program is and that it’s the hospitalist’s job to communicate with their primary care physician.
• Offer patients and their family members a business card with a photo.
• Connect on a personal level by talking about something other than the patient’s medical care. Ask about the food. How is the TV? It only takes a second to ask.
• Use props to your advantage. Whiteboards in the room are a great place to put the physician’s name and facts about the plan of care. But if the whiteboard isn’t filled out or up-to-date, it can be worse than having no board at all. So make sure it is updated and that all the hospitalists have a steady supply of markers.
• Get a chair and sit down. If you remain standing during the visit, it looks like you want to be somewhere else. Always make sure your patients feel that you have as much time as they need, even if you don’t.
• Never pass a call light. This takes a lot of collaboration by all the providers on the floor. But when hospital staff members pass their room when the call light is on, it makes them feel abandoned.
• Never tell a patient that you are so busy or that you have so many patients. "They don’t want to hear it. What they want to hear is that they are either the most important patient to you or they want to feel like they are the only patient you have to take care of," Dr. Short said. Telling patients about your busy schedule is the surest way to see your scores plummet.
On Twitter @MaryEllenNY
