Take a listening journey and pick up some tips from St. Luke’s, as they describe making their way towards meaningful patient engagement.
Title: Revving up a Patient-driven Experience
Guests:
Clark Averill, IT Director
Missy Francisco Carlson, Patient Experience Program Manager
Host: Christine Parent, Associate Vice President, MEDITECH
Missy: Being transparent helps us figure out what we can work on, where can we be better.
Christine: I'm Christine Parent MEDITECH’s Associate Vice President and once again I'm talking with St. Luke's Regional Health Care System, a non-profit health system based in Duluth, Minnesota. During our last episode, I talked with Clark April, CIO, and Missy Francisco Carlson, Patient Experience Program Manager, who shared their vaccine strategies. Today we'll learn more about St. Luke's strategy for improving the patient experience and what opportunities lie ahead with their successful portal adoption. Welcome to you both.
Ensuring a positive patient experience really goes well and beyond the technology that we've been talking about so what else is St. Luke's doing to support your patients and Missy, I think I'm going to start with you on this one.
Missy: Here at St. Luke’s, we take the patient satisfaction results very seriously. Currently, we are proud to say on hospitalcompare.gov we are ranked as a four-star out of five-star hospital for patient experience. The national average is three but we really work hand in hand. We use Press Ganey as our patient satisfaction survey vendor and we really work hand in hand with them each year to identify what our top three influences are or really kind of our key drivers or key questions to know where do we want to put our focus? What are our patients telling us and again how can we evolve so we're very transparent with the information that we receive back from our patients to our staff members?
Each month it's a requirement that all of our supervisors, managers, directors, etc. post the results of our patient satisfaction surveys in their area so we know exactly what our very own patients are saying about us and when we say post you know we definitely post all of those positive comments that come in and there certainly are a lot of positive comments. But there's also some negative comments that come in and we do post that because again being transparent helps us figure out what we can work on, where can we be better?
The other thing I would say that we do here too is we have quality boards throughout our organization and again it allows us to be transparent with our patients on what we are working on from a patient satisfaction standpoint but also from a quality and safety standpoint. How are we doing it? What we are doing and how we are evolving is also important because obviously, we're always striving to be better. Everyone should be, right? And the portal has also helped us increase those responses in our patient satisfaction survey since we've been able to have more emails on file through Clark and his team and adding that on.
So I think one of the largest things that happens here at St. Luke's that we're very proud of is that there is a large focus on employees. Employee engagement is very, very important for us. You know our employees are our very best source of advertising and we want to make sure that they are strong ambassadors for the organization and the healthcare system as a whole.
We try to keep them very happy. We do employee engagement surveys. We do some fun things as an enterprise-wide team. We have a local baseball team here so every summer we host baseball games and have their staff, staff members and their families, and their co-workers all attend. We do fun things to try to create kind of a team atmosphere. The other day living in Northern Minnesota it was 20 below and we had an obviously those in non-patient care areas but we had a dress like a lumberjack day where everybody came dressed in flannels and suspenders and it was really fun, people loved it! They had a good time and so it's important to us that you know that they are able, they're able to have fun at work and that they enjoy what they're doing because if they're not taking care of themselves and bringing their best selves each and every day we can’t expect them to give themselves, their best selves to our patients every day too.
Christine: So the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly shaped the way we engage patients. What strategies do you see continuing on in a post-pandemic world? Clark, do you want to begin?
Clark: Well, I really do think that COVID has shown us a lot of different things about how we need to change the delivery of healthcare to make the patient at the center of everything we do and you know healthcare has always been so used to having the patient drive the experience whether it's the patient coming to us when they're not feeling well or they call us to schedule a visit.
You know almost all of the encounters have always been driven by the patient and I think what the portal gives us the opportunity to do is interact with the patient in a radically different way that the patient really does enjoy and so while we didn't have a lot of virtual visits before I do think that virtual visits are here to stay. We still continue to see a very large number of virtual visits being done especially in our mental health clinic. I think people that are undergoing that mental health stress or having issues with their life would really prefer not to have to come in. They're very self-conscious about that type of visit and so virtual visits I think are going to be the new standard way for mental health.
But, I don't think it's just limited to virtual visits. We do know that the EMR is very rich with data. The patients really want to be able to see everything that we have documented about them and get their lab results and get their x-ray results and get their progress notes and their operative reports you know as quickly as possible and so we made some major changes last year to decrease the amount of time that it takes for that information to become available. We basically made almost every physician report, every lab result, and every diagnostic imaging test published to the portal so the patient could see it at the time it was resulted, and that's been a huge patient satisfier. I actually think that was one of the reasons that our portal enrollment went up so fast along with the virtual visits — the ability to see information.
So you know we look at the portal statistics a couple of different ways. We take a look and say well what's our percentage of people that have had a care experience with St. Luke's and how many of those patients are signed up and we're sitting at almost 40 percent of our patients that we've seen at St. Luke's have a portal account. But, that's not quite as great of measurement because you've got some people that will never sign up. We're a vacation area in Minnesota here and so a patient that came to the emergency room for a one-time visit and they went back to where they live you know we're never going to see that patient as a portal user. So what we actually do is we measure the amount of patients that have ongoing relationships with a primary care physician and we measure that percentage and that percentage is at 55 percent. So 55 percent of the patients that we've got ongoing care experience with are enrolled in our portal and we're going to continue to really look at that number as our prime measure of how our portal is doing.
We have some clinics that are in the 62, 63 percent of their patients are enrolled. We also have some clinics that have a very low percentage and other clinics you'd expect like pediatrics and you know young child. But we also have some very underserved areas without Internet and those clinics are also very low and that's what drives their number down. I think we'd be sitting in the high 60 percent if we didn't have such limited internet access in some parts of Minnesota.
So I really do believe that you know having the ability for a patient to do as much self-service and have some of the tools that they're used to in other industries like banking where you can, you know, look at your balance and pay your bills and deposit checks electronically. You know you're going to be able to do a lot of that via the patient portal. You're going to be able to message your physician and have a dialogue about your care. You're going to be able to look at your results as quickly as the physician does in many cases much quicker than the physician is seeing them and then you're also going to be able to do some of the self-service things like scheduling your visits, filling out forms electronically so you don't have to do it when you arrive at the clinic. Those are all satisfiers because people don't like to have to do that during the stress of a visit and so I think that those are the types of things that we really hope to leverage the patient portal for moving forward, post-pandemic which is getting closer and closer every day.
Missy, do you have any comments?
Missy: I would say the strategies that I see continuing on in a post-pandemic world is the continuation and increase of communication that we have with those and I'm going to even say around us. It's not just patients and their families but you know we really increased our communication strategy because that is what our patients needed at the time of COVID. We were having bi-weekly COVID updates to patients both internal staff members, town halls, we were communicating a lot with the city, with the county, the state, with legislators. I think that will continue to happen because communication is the way we solve those types of things really. I think communication is so important that the patient portal allows us to continue and make it easier and quicker in this type of a world where people need things quickly and we need to act quickly too.
So I see communication remaining strong through the patient portal specifically continuing long after the pandemic is finished.
Christine: Well this was a great discussion! I'd like to thank you for joining me today to discuss your experience and successes with patient engagement during these times. It is easy to see the impact that your efforts had on your community, in patients.
As we end our session I always like to ask a fun and personal question and as we've been speaking about the pandemic I'll stay on that theme. So I'll start with Clark. It's an understatement to say that it's been a stressful 12 plus months in healthcare with COVID. Can you share to our listeners what you did to de-stress during this pandemic personally either for downtime or something you did to re-energize yourself?
Clark: Well, I’m an avid golfer so I would say that the way that I'd de-stressed as I golf even more than I normally do. Last year fortunately for the golfers and the courses were open and you're naturally separated. Especially if you're playing out of the woods like I do and so you know I actually use that to de-stress as much as possible. That and I think I finished Netflix if I remember correctly but so I'm onto Hulu but you know just really I think it's really critical that all staff members and actually everybody figures out what, how to take care of themselves.
Christine: It was, it was a tough year. Missy do you have anything that you do?
Missy: You know with the gym’s closing we actually ordered a Peloton and was very grateful to have that around. Working in healthcare we always stress to our patients and our colleagues and co-workers how important physical and mental health is and that definitely helped get me through. It's hard! I'll tell you what, it's hard but what a great challenge and a great feeling afterward.
Christine: Oh, that's fantastic and I too was a Netflix person so yeah I'll have to check out Hulu. So I want to thank you again, both of you for joining me today.
Thanks for listening. Next time we'll talk with Denao Ruttino, Vice President of Operations and CIO at Firelands Regional Health System on how his organization leveraged analytics and a centralized command center to stay ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic. Stay informed and subscribe to MEDITECH’s podcasts and be sure to check out our resource page for links from this episode. We'll talk to you next time.