Hi, everyone. This is Erica Carbajal with Becker's
HealthCare. Thank you all for tuning in to
this episode of the Becker's HealthCare podcast series.
Today, we're gonna be discussing patient centric care
and its impact on the future of health
care organizations.
Joining me for today's discussion is Faria Siddiqui,
director of health care services at the Kaleidoscope
Group. Faria, thank you so much for joining
us today. Hi, Erica. Thanks for having me.
Yeah. Before we delve into the topic, do
you mind just sharing a bit about yourself
and your work in health care?
Yes. Of course. So as you said, I
serve as the director of health care services
at Kaleidoscope Group.
We are a global change management consulting firm
with over thirty years of experience in several
business industries.
I specifically work with our health care clients,
so that's health care systems, global pharmaceutical companies,
nonprofits,
community organizations.
And what we do together is we develop
and execute both their internal and their external
people strategies.
So that means employee experience,
organizational
culture, patient experience,
you know, different strategies on how to get
involved in the community and so on.
Yeah. Thanks, Priya. Some some wide ranging work
there touching really all aspects when it comes
to health care in terms of employees, organization,
and patient
experience.
So patient centered care is at the forefront
of health care strategies this year. It's a
term that comes up a lot in conversations
with health system leaders.
So can you start there and share a
bit about what are the essential elements of
an effective
patient centered care strategy and why?
Yeah. You know, that's a great question.
And I always say there's three high level
points
that I believe many organizations
overlook when it comes to their patient experience
strategies.
And number one,
prioritization.
Prioritizing
patient centered care. You know, we can have
talks about this all day long,
but we know that in reality, leaders of
health care institutions are faced with so many
competing priorities,
especially now with all of these recent changes
at a federal level,
whether that's budget cuts, reimbursement
changes,
workforce and staffing issues,
unionization,
whatever it is. It is very easy to,
you know, conduct a patient
satisfaction survey,
get the results, and let the results sit
under a pile of other issues.
If you let patient experience fall to the
side, you will see the impact in all
of your other priority areas because it is
all connected.
Number two,
so important to include the entire patient journey.
So a lot of times,
people think that patient experience is just that
interaction between the physician and the patient.
It's actually all aspects of the patient journey
through the health care system. So at Kaleidoscope
Group, we have a seven step patient journey
map, and that starts from, you know, health
system promotion and prevention efforts. So how does
a patient hear about the hospital system? Are
they in community served, you know, through mobile
clinics, workshops?
What is the health care system doing to
prevent disease at a community health level?
And then it goes on, you know, to
when the patient interacts with the front desk
staff the first time they come in. Do
they feel welcome? Do they feel like they
belong? Is someone helping them figure out where
to go?
And it goes all the way, you know,
to discharge and follow-up care.
So all of these aspects need to be
considered.
And then number three, integration
into workflows. So
ensuring that patient centered care is baked into
our workflows. That looks like, you know, as
a clinician,
are you conducting regular family rounds along with
the rounds you do with your students and
your residents?
As a nurse, are you helping to educate
the patient without, you know, medical jargon?
As an admin, are you creating, you know,
comfortable waiting areas, providing resources,
helping patients understand their billing?
These are things that need to be embedded
into the day to day habits of each
role, and that comes, you know, with the
rules and the structures that we create for
our daily workflows.
Along with that, we also have to be
ready for resistance to change. So anytime we
ask people to change their behaviors,
we will be met with, you know,
I forgot or
I don't want to or, you know, that
doesn't make sense to me. All of these
different ways that people resist change, and there
needs to be a plan to address that.
So, you know, the three things, three essential
elements for an effective strategy and patient centered
care,
prioritization,
the patient journey map, and integration into workflows.
Yeah. Faria, and I think you raise an
interesting point just around
the fact that patient centered care and and
strategizing around this really begins
before the clinical care actually happens, as you
mentioned. It's much much broader than that. And
on that note, can you share a bit
about where organizational
culture fits in here, and how can health
care systems support providers
to ensure that they're actually able to deliver
thoughtful, compassionate care?
Yeah. So like I said, providers are not
solely responsible for patient experience.
However, they tend to shoulder the most responsibility.
We can't expect our, you know, physicians,
our PAs, our nurse staff who are face
to face with patients playing so many different
roles already. Right?
They're taking the history. They're doing the physical
exam.
They're diagnosing.
They're also thinking of billing issues. They're scribing.
Sometimes they're also teachers. Right? If they have
students or residents in the room.
And all of this while encounters are limited
to maybe ten, fifteen minutes.
At the same time, we're also asking them
to ensure that the patient has an amazing
experience, answer their questions, talk to their families,
etcetera, etcetera.
To do this effectively,
we need
to
have a team
to help support this objective. It can't all
fall onto the shoulders of the health care
worker.
At the same time, we also need to
realize that health care workers are human.
Right? And they're dealing with an organizational culture
in medicine and in health care that is
not very forgiving.
We are seeing this trend of unionization
post COVID,
and demands that these health care workers are
making are actually very simple. Right? Give us
a salary that we can survive on. Give
us a holiday once in a while. Protect
us from the growing levels of patient violence.
If we want to ask health care workers
to have empathy for their patients,
we as health care leaders need to also
have that empathy for our health care workers
and create an organizational culture which helps them
do that.
Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of this
bolts back
to what we hear from, again, a lot
of health system leaders just around
placing more intentional focus and energy around
alleviating
physicians and clinicians from administrative burdens and really
being able to focus on what they enjoy
doing most and what they are trained to
do, which is, you know, patient care. And
so all of this is so interrelated.
Fria, on the technology side, obviously,
a major area in focus when it comes
to patient engagement.
How can organizations
ensure that their technology on the technology side
of things, that they're meeting the needs of
diverse populations?
Yeah. You know, currently, we are living in
times where DE and I work is being
censored.
And, you know, that's fine,
if you don't wanna use the words,
whatever your politics are. But nobody can deny
the fact that we are all different,
whether that's, you know, diversity and race,
physical ability,
geographic location, education level, income level,
every person is different.
And as a business leader, if you ignore
this fact, you will see the impact in
your bottom line. And how does that show
up? So as a health tech founder, if
you are not including diverse perspectives when it
comes to user experience,
you will find it difficult in the implementation
phase. So if a patient can't, you know,
read the font on your screen, if there's
no option for different languages, if there's no
option to connect to a human in the
virtual help desk, you know, versus AI,
whatever it is, if it becomes difficult, patients
will simply not use your app.
And similarly, as a health care system leader,
if you are choosing to invest in applications
that are ultimately ineffective,
that's money that's going down the drain.
There are people, you know, whose role it
is to consider which apps or AI apps
are worth the investment of the hospital system.
And really, it's the ones that people use.
So, you know, how can tech meet the
needs of diverse patients? The most important way
to do this,
and the most simple way to do this
is to include diverse perspectives throughout the building
stages of your app.
Sometimes in the tech world, we can be
very caught up, you know, in features and
functions,
making investors happy, all of the things that
it takes to build an app. And we
forget the basics.
How are people using this app? Does it
work for them? What are their complaints?
What issues have they asked for while troubleshooting?
Make sure that you have diverse groups of
people test your app out and listen to
their feedback. It's really as simple as that.
Briha, looking ahead, how can patient centered care
support the long term sustainability
of health care organizations?
What can leaders be doing now to ensure
that this concept is meaningfully put into practice
and at scale?
Yeah. As we, you know, continue to see
budget cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, changes in
language and research funding and all of the
other impacts of the,
new administration's executive orders,
it will be very easy to let patient
centered care fall to the side.
But I will say, you know, whoever chooses
to ignore the patient,
they will see the impact of that in
their quality scores,
in their health outcomes, in their reimbursement rates,
honestly, in your lawsuits and in your health
care system reputations. Right? So I can tell
you a simple story. In my neighborhood where
I grew up, all of my friends who
are moms, they know, you know, which hospital
to avoid for their OB GYN care and
their labor and delivery,
and they know which hospital is best for
that type of care. And they all go
to that one instead.
So reputation amongst your community really says everything
about how they are experiencing your hospital system
and which system your consumers are actually gonna
use for their care.
So,
making sure that this patient centered care is
sustainable at your organization is very important.
And how can you ensure that it's sustainable?
At Kaleidoscope Group,
we have the three c's to sustainable change
management. In
true consulting fashion, we have an acronym to
make everything easier for everybody.
The three c's are commitment, course, and competence.
And commitment comes at two different levels. The
first is executive commitment.
Commitment from the c suite looks like appropriate
resources and budgeting,
guidance for committees and groups led with the
charge for change,
speaking up publicly and advocating.
Without commitment from the c suite, you are
not gonna have a sustainable level of infrastructure.
And it's gonna
infrastructure.
And it's going to be interesting to see,
you know, as we continue to see the
impact of federal level changes where commitment is
at the C suite.
And then commitment can also
come from a change agent level at each
department. So that's nurse staff of patient experience,
medical billing staff of patient experience, someone who
is committed to bettering the patient experience within
their sphere of influence
and is ready to manage the issues that
come up with implementation.
Number two, course, we've talked about this a
bit already.
Development of a clear strategic plan where patient
experience is
not just, you know, a couple of folks
in a department,
but it is integrated into the daily workflow
of each person in the health care patient
journey.
And number three, competence, ensuring your employees are
educated and competent in implementing these changes. So
that's like,
how are these
how are how are they being educated on
these changes? How are they being supported when
they have questions? Is there someone they can
go
to, for help?
So those are the three c's, commitment, course,
and competence.
Bria, is there anything else before we close
out? We didn't cover on the topic that
you wanted to mention.
Yeah. You know, we are in interesting times
right now with the new administration changes. We
are still seeing the downstream impacts of how
our industry functions.
We are seeing changes to women's health, LGBTQ
health,
removal of equity based programming and research funding,
potential changes to how Medicare and Medicaid reimburses.
Regardless of your politics, these are huge changes
that we are gonna continue to grapple with
and, continue to see how they impact our
functioning within a health care system on a
day to day basis
and what outcomes we're gonna face for those
functioning decisions. So throughout all of this change,
I wanna urge our health care leaders who
are listening.
Number one,
go back to your values. You know, you
will have to face decisions on how to
manage this change.
Don't let your patients become deprioritized.
Number two, stay agile, stay growth minded, stay
innovative through the change.
And number three, we always encourage honest and
empathetic communication to your staff and to your
public
because when it comes to leading change rather
than letting change lead you, the number one
thing is maintaining trust.
Maria, thank you so much for being on
today. We appreciate your insights.
Thank you for having me, Erica. It was
it was a pleasure.
Yeah. Absolutely.
And we also wanna thank our podcast sponsor,
the Kaleidoscope Group. And listeners, you can tune
into additional podcast episodes by visiting the podcast
page on our website at beckershospitalreview.com.
Thanks, everyone.