Achieving the Care Experience We Want for Our Own Loved Ones

GBMC has been driving towards our vision of providing the care we would want for our own loved ones as we defined it 10 years ago. We have made great improvement in each of the four aims (Better Health, Better Care, Least Waste, and More Joy). In FY 20, we made outstanding progress in the inpatient care experience. How do we know that our changes resulted in improvement? Well, in the early 2000’s, the federal government began requiring hospitals to ask their patients a standard set of questions after discharge so that patient satisfaction could be compared across hospitals. This system is called the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, or HCAHPS.

The survey asks questions about aspects of the patients' hospital experiences such as communication with nurses and doctors, the responsiveness of hospital staff, the cleanliness and quietness of the hospital environment, pain management, communication about medicines, discharge information, overall rating of the hospital, and whether or not they would recommend the hospital. This data is then published on the Hospital Compare website at https://www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html

GBMC met the HCAHPS Overall and Cleanliness goals for FY 20. Our multidisciplinary teams implemented two tactics that led to this achievement: Leader Rounding and Purposeful Rounding. In leader rounding, the manager visits patients and asks them about their care experience. This gives the manager real-time information that can be used to learn about and improve systems as well as to do service recovery. In purposeful rounding, nurses and nursing technicians visit each patient hourly and check to see that all of the patient’s needs are being met.

I am so grateful to the entire GBMC team, especially to our nurses, nursing support technicians, and environmental service workers for this great accomplishment!

It will take some time before the Hospital Compare website is updated to include this most recent timeframe, but I encourage all readers to visit the website and see how GBMC measures up on HCAHPS and other quality of care metrics.

Happy Birthday to Us!

Finally, I want to wish everyone in our GBMC family a safe and happy Independence Day. July 4th marks the birthday of our country and I hope everyone can take time during this holiday to reflect on what being an American means and what we can each do to make our country even better than it is today.