Feedback about any experience is crucial for its provider, and healthcare is the sector where the client’s opinion and outcomes determine the course of development. Nash et al. (2019) claim that “in multiple analyses of the independent drivers of patients’ global ratings of care, the measures that have consistently emerged as correlates are coordination of care, caring behaviors, and communication” (p. 236). Consequently, a compelling scoreboard for assessing clients’ experience must include a holistic evaluation of practices together with certain factors expected from the providers to be performed. This paper aims to discuss how a healthcare organization can establish and achieve goals via the patients’ experience traction, analysis, and dashboards creation.
Long-term acute care facilities can implement measurement tools such as scoreboards to aggregate patient feedback, identify practice gaps, and motivate personnel to develop new skills and improve the existing ones. A hospital needs to begin by identifying the most important metrics for their clients, such as information, responsiveness, personalization, privacy, pain control, and skills (Nash et al., 2019). Separate units can adjust the feedback to gather and involve families and patients to get more information about an experience (Bohm et al., 2021). For instance, the Kindred Hospital in San Francisco Bay Area created a visually perceivable dashboard through which clients’ experiences are analyzed, tracked, and presented to understand better how to achieve the facility’s goals. Patients receive pulmonary, wound, diabetes, organ transplant, palliative, and stroke care there, and evaluating their experiences requires selecting the vital factors to measure (Kindred Hospital, n. d.). Furthermore, a visually understandable dashboard is necessary for the strategy to succeed, and processed feedback must apply to the overall format.
Kindred Hospital developed a score-based system and dashboard where the ratings are applied next to the goals and can be changed if the quality of related patient experience improves or decreases. As a long-term acute care provider, the facility aspires to maintain patients’ satisfaction throughout the treatment and do it effectively through professionally performed procedures, communication, setting clearness, and sufficient equipment (Kindred Hospital, n. d.). The one-to-ten evaluation scorecards were created with the goals listed through the inquiry to evaluate, and clients filled them at the end of their treatment. Daily procedures performance, kindness, responsiveness, empathy, quality of beds, equipment, cleaning, hygiene, and nutrition were included so that the feedback’s average score addressed the overall experience. The dashboard at Kindred Hospital is accessible to all personnel and is being revised monthly to address the changes and help achieve the goals.
The primary strategy to support the high quality of care at Kindred Hospital is to maintain an overall score and points for each factor above eight. If any segment goes below the benchmark, the practices responsible personnel performed are reviewed, and improvement strategies are discussed. If the scorecards continuously receive low average results, the signal of a severe quality issue emerges. Maintaining a dashboard and keeping the scores up to date can be a valuable risk management tool for all segments of patient experience (Bunting & Siegal, 2017). Kindred Hospital’s scoreboards helped the facility to reveal that recently received injection equipment was lower quality and could harm clients, yet was replaced as the experience scorecard reached the dashboard and lowered the average total.
Healthcare quality is essential for the facilities to maintain high performance, and receiving feedback from patients is the most effective way of identifying challenges to address. Scorecards and dashboards allow hospitals to track and measure patients’ experience by dividing it into evaluating various factors such as communication, environment, quality of service, and equipment. The example of Kindred Hospital revealed how the measurement systems could be applied to organizational and risk management, timely solve the problems and keep personnel motivated to deliver at their best.
References
Bohm, V., Lacaille, D., Spencer, N., & Barber, C. E. (2021). Scoping review of balanced scorecards for use in healthcare settings: development and implementation. BMJ Open Quality, 10(3), e001293.
Bunting Jr, R. F., & Siegal, D. (2017). Developing risk management dashboards using risk and quality measures: A visual best practices approach. Journal of Healthcare Risk Management, 37(2), 8-28.
Kindred Hospital. (n. d.). Patient experience.
Nash, D. B., Joshi, M. S., Ransom, E. R., & Ransom, S. B. (Eds.). (2019). The healthcare quality book: Vision, strategy, and tools (4th ed.). Health Administration Press.